Book Review: Mycroft Holmes
/A debut adventure starring the smarter older brother of Sherlock Holmes
Read MoreBook Review: Chasing the Phoenix
/Michael Swanwick's terrific new novel features a con artist and a genetically modified dog-man seeking riches and power in a post-post-apocalyptic China
Read MoreBook Review: Agents of Empire
/In the continents-spanning 16th-century clash between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, a crucial role was played by Albania - and by two families at the heart of events
Read MoreBook Review: The Automobile Club of Egypt
/The celebrated author of "The Yacoubian Building" returns with another panoramic look at life in modern Egypt during a pivotal era
Read MoreBook 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 MoreBook Review: Death in Florence
/At the end of the 14th century, Lorenzo de' Medici and the friar Savonarola began a series of clashes in palace and pulpit that would end up altering the course of the city's history. A lively new book tells the story.
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.
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