Review: ‘Edgar and Lucy’ by Victor Lodato
A poet, a playwright and a novelist, not to mention the winner of a Guggenheim and a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, writer Victor...
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Why Jessa Crispin is ‘Not a Feminist’
A little etymology can be helpful in approaching Jessa Crispin's latest book, "Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto." The word "manifesto" arrived in English by way of...
In ‘Flaneuse,’ Lauren Elkin follows women meandering through the world’s greatest cities
Flaneur is one of those fancy-sounding French words that tend to freak Americans out, but its meaning is unintimidating and should be a lot more widespread. Although, as with any...
‘Lucky Boy’ by Shanthi Sekaran explores illegal immigration and adoption
If John Gardner is to be believed, then there are only two plots in all of literature: "A person goes on a journey" and "A stranger comes to town." In...
Review: Siri Hustvedt marries art and science in ‘A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women’
Siri, the computer program that operates as an artificially intelligent personal assistant, appears to know the answers to everything. So seemingly, does the author Siri Hustvedt, or at least such...
‘How to Survive a Plague’ weaves science with human scale of AIDS epidemic
Everybody knows that the size of a book does not guarantee its quality, yet there's still something thrilling about a book of a certain heft; a door-stopper-size tome speaks silently...
‘Big Bosses’ tells story of secretary for renowned employers in New York, Chicago
In the early days of a certain revolutionary piece of office machinery, as well as the history-making move into the workforce of women who made their living with it, both...
The ‘Ballad’ of Magda Szabo
New York Review of Books Classics did English-speaking readers an enormous service when it published Hungarian writer Magda Szabo's tense and rending "The Door" in 2015, and it has us...
Former lawyer Monica Youn makes her case in new poetry collection ‘Blackacre’
Most nonlawyers are familiar with the custom of using the names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" to signify an anonymous party, usually the plaintiff, in a legal action. Fewer people...
Chelsea Martin’s ‘Mickey’ reads like a letter from a teen
If novelist Jean Rhys had lived into the age of social media, then she might have written a book like "Mickey," the funny, depressive, and semi-stream-of-consciousness new novella by Chelsea...