Lurking beneath the main concerns of 'Zero K' is a story of filial conflict, though moving portrayals of interpersonal relationships are not exactly DeLillo’s thing.
Beverly Cleary captures a child’s perspective in a way that is totally convincing and never condescending, and feels authentic even several decades on.
Simon Leys’s Catholic sensibility is never insistent, and never descends into preachiness. As he said of Confucius, sometimes it can be better to stay silent.
Adam Sisman's new biography of le Carré—cartoonist, actor, mimic, linguist, expert skier,and spy—is intelligent, thoroughly researched, and tediously repetitive.
There is no release or relief in poet Dan Burt's story, just a stark and pervading sense of emotional sclerosis from the streets of Philly to the halls of Cambridge.
Barry’s new novel—featuring John Lennon as protagonist—meditates on place, grief, and longing, ranging across a century’s worth of literary and popular references.
Rather than a triumph, Dionne says "the history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal.” But is his diagnosis correct?
Slots, video poker, and other gambling machines are often described as games, but they're a sinful rejection of the goodness of the world and a failure to rejoice.
Among the merits of Roy Foster’s new book are the ways in which it moves past myths and conventional accounts to bring alive the intellectual ferment of the Rising.
Fleming Rutledge probes “the strange new world of the Bible” to its mysterious and scandalous depth in the crucifixion of God's son, and diagnoses our deepest need.
The stories in Colum McCann's collection each have thirteen sections that build slowly, surely toward denouement. By the end, a shift in perspective has taken place.
Many take Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken' as an American affirmation to choose one's own path. But in David Orr's reading the twenty-line poem is instead about limits.
"War and Peace" is called the greatest novel ever written, but it’s like sticking a “Kick me” sign on the book. Readers can’t help wanting to take issue with it.
Why are there more versions of 'Anna Karenina' (1878) in 2016? According to some translators "the best" will never be available and so translation must continue.
Paul Lisicky's book is a memoir of love and friendship, and how sometimes their boundaries blur. But it's also a book about literary ambition and its discontents.
How to describe the almost-madness of loss? Macdonald uses hawk-taming, Smith "ordinary" poetry about death, and Chapman "Christian love of existence."
Luke Timothy Johnson provides an important alternative to the “theologies of the body” on offer among those thinkers elaborating themes fashioned by John Paul II.
It is the purpose Michael N. McGregor’s biography of Robert Lax to move him out from under the shadow of Merton’s personality and give him his own place in the sun.
Terry Eagleton gives a witty and insightful tour of hope’s complicated linguistic terrain that carefully avoids proposing some once-and-for-all grand Theory of Hope.
Writers engage biblical texts ranging from the Psalms to a single parable.Their essays are wildly heterogeneous in tone and method, kind of like the Bible itself.
Philip Jenkins sets out to demolish a popular theological myth that the second-century apocryphal writings were unknown until recently; he makes a convincing case.
Paul Misner's new book goes beyond social and labor movements in the church to deal with papal and episcopal action vis-à-vis the great powers between 1914 and 1965.
For scholars interested in the history of theology and biblical interpretation, these twelve short essays offer new approaches to Psalms, moral philosophy, and more.
Mathewes-Green, a convert from the Episcopal tradition, focuses on Orthodoxy as a path to God and uses the actions and prayers of the liturgy as a basis for theology
Editors Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon contend that Nietzsche’s impassioned critique of 19th century education sheds light on the decline of education in the 21st.
Scott Shane's telling of the U.S.-born Muslim preacher-turned-terrorist and his surveillance by the FBI reveals that the calculus for terrorism is political.
In his latest, Thomas Mallon turns real-life figures like Nixon, Reagan, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer into characters as skillfully as he creates fictional ones.
In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s interpretation of race in America, hope doesn't fit into the narrative—something James Baldwin, to whom he's compared, wouldn't leave out.
What fascinates Maraniss about Detroit more than its ruin is how central its story is to the broader course of U.S. history—Motown, the local Mob, the auto industry.
'Go Set Watchman' shows that though Atticus Finch defended a black man in court, he was still a man of his time—on the white citizens council, resisting integration.
John Boyne’s new novel pays attention to the circumstances of priestly life in real-world Catholic Ireland, asking: How does one be a good priest under suspicion?
Anahid Nersessian argues that Romanticism dramatizes the “desirability of constraint.” Her book on how British Romantics imagined "utopia" powerfully does the same.
Historical reminders of how the Mediterranean connects Europe, Asia, and Africa at least as often as it separates the three continents from one another.
