Book Review: The Daughters
/In Adrienne Celt's remarkably rich debut novel, an opera singer is worried that the birth of her daughter has robbed her of her singing voice
Read MoreBook Review: The Trials
/In the wake of professional betrayal and global catastrophe, the heroes of Linda Nagata's "Red" Trilogy are confronted by a new threat as the series barrels on
Read MoreComics: Clinging to Art!
/Both the big superhero comic book companies, Marvel and DC, are currently in continuity turmoil that would be shocking if it weren’t so crucially boring. And it makes the weekly trip to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston a bit of a trial. Gone beyond reclamation – almost beyond recall – are the days when […]
Read MoreHope and Pope in the Penny Press!
/The latest issue of Harper’s very much wanted me to pay most of my attention to William Deresiewicz’s cover essay on how colleges and universities these days have been co-opted by a “neo-liberal” agenda that infests institutions of higher learning – and how the students themselves have also been co-opted by this agenda, now […]
Read MoreBook Review: Browsings
/Book critic Michael Dirda's latest collection offers more personal musings on the subject he loves most
Read MoreClassics Reissued: Salvaged Pages
/A new edition of this collection of Holocaust diaries by young people captures the voices and the worries of the Nazis' most innocent victims
Read MoreThe Cape at Summer’s End!
/Our book today is My Own Cape Cod, which Gladys Taber wrote in 1971 about her many idyllic seasons at Still Cove, her house on Mill Pond at Orleans on Cape Cod. We’ve met Taber already here at Stevereads as the once-popular author of the Stillmeadow books (hence the name of her cove), and in […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: The White Ghost!
/Our book today is The White Ghost, the latest historical mystery by James R. Benn starring Bostonian ex-detective and now WWII Lieutenant Billy Boyle. In this tenth Billy Boyle adventure (each one of which easily stands alone for new readers), Boyle and his friend Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz, an expatriate Polish count who functions as […]
Read MoreBook Review: Bismarck
/A newly-reprinted biography of the "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck is noticeably short - what kind of a job does it do?
Read MoreBook Review: Beirut, Beirut
/Bloomsbury publishes a lovely new English-language translation of Sonallah Ibrahim's great novel about the Lebanese Civil War
Read MoreBook Review: The Casualties
/You wouldn't bet on a little street in Edinburgh - or its eccentric inhabitants - surviving a series of world-battering catastrophes, but that's both the starting and the ending point of Nick Holdstock's fascinating first novel
Read MoreBook Review: After Nature
/In his brilliant new book, Jedediah Purdy argues that humanity must face the collapse of nature using the three tools it knows best: politics, policy, and cold, hard cash
Read MoreThe English Dog at Home!
/Our book today, Felicity Wigan’s oversized 1987 treat The English Dog at Home (with beautiful photographs by Geoffrey Shakerley) might more accurately have been titled The English Dog at the Stately Home, since the dogs in question aren’t exactly the spavined little mutts owned by every Darby and Joan in the tenements of Leeds. No, […]
Read MoreBook Review: Under Tiberius
/In a dusty Vatican archive, an ancient manuscript is found that could change the world. Or whatever.
Read MoreBook Review: No. 4 Imperial Lane
/The woes of empire and the decline of the aristocracy form the backdrop for Jonathan Weisman's smart and moving debut novel, set in Thatcher's England.
Read More90 Years of New Yorker Cartoons in the Penny Press!
/On newsstands now, as the saying goes, is one of my very favorite semi-regular Penny Press confections: a New Yorker cartoon collection. This one is meant to commemorate the magazine’s 90th anniversary (as unbelievable as that figure must seem to some of us), and (equally unbelievable, in its own way) this seems to be the […]
Read MoreBook Review: The End of Tsarist Russia
/A powerful new book by one of our best historians examines from new sources the torturous path Russia took to the First World War
Read MoreThe Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World!
/Our book today is Sir Edward Creasy’s durable 1851 classic work of popular military history, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a worthy work that no 21st-century reader can approach without feeling just about the saddest irony in the world. Creasy, surveying the sunny morning of his Victorian era, with Napoleon Bonaparte long since […]
Read MoreThe Height of Fashion in the Penny Press!
/After a solid week of Penguin Classics, what better palate-cleanser could there be than a sojourn through the Fall Fashion issues of the glossy magazines? It’s a way to run a quick finger down the ‘content’-xylophone from the deeper notes of Longfellow and Dostoevsky to, well, to the very, very strange world of fashion. Almost […]
Read MoreBook Review: Still Life Las Vegas
/In this funny and touching debut, a young man's search for his missing mother leads to unexpected discoveries amid the lights of Las Vegas
Read More