Loads of Learned Lumber

THIS PAST SPRING, I taught for the eighth or ninth time a course called "Modern Novel." As usual, for the final paper, the student...

HAVING READ ALS'S reviews here and there for many years, I expected to enjoy this, and some of it I had already read, but I was not at a...

ON THE EVIDENCE of this and McNeil's and McCain's superb Please Kill Me , the oral history form admirably suits the task of chronicl...

BEFORE WE PROCEED to what is now St. Aubyn's next-to-most-recent novel--I found the normally reliable John Banville annoying when review...

IT TOOK A while, as I was reading this, to decide whether I was enjoying it. In the early going, it seemed to be an (early-ish) Jonathan Let...

AN APPROPRIATELY ODD kind of convergence led me to this. First, my mother, who died a little over twenty years ago, really loved Shirley J...

FUNNY THING, GIVEN Paisley Rekdal's age and background, but as I read this book I kept thinking of Seamus Heaney. Consider the opening...