Book Review: Making Nice
/In Matt Sumell's debut, his main character manages to alienate every other person in the book, often by punching them.
Read MoreBook Review: The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins
/In the vastness of the world's oceans, some mammals have evolved brains and language ... and culture? A fascinating new book looks at the inner lives of whales and dolphins
Read MorePelican Scriptural Commentaries!
/Our propitiation of Boston’s suddenly-wrathful Deity continues today with yet more Pelican Scripture Commentaries! I recently looked back at the Big Four, the long Gospel commentaries Pelican put out half a century ago, but in the course of nervously plucking them off my snowbound bookshelves, I came across plenty of secondary Pelican commentaries, several of […]
Read MorePELICANS! The Pelican Gospel Commentaries!
/Our books today are the four hefty volumes that constitute the core of the old Pelican Gospel Commentaries, and we turn to them with a kind of cold-sweat urgency: as the endless snow continues to fall, as the very infrastructure of Boston begins to crumble, Stevereads continues its perhaps-futile bid to appease the peevish Deity […]
Read MoreBook Review: Table Talk
/For twenty-five years, the "Table Talk" feature of The Threepenny Review has offered occasional musings on a wide range of topics by some of the best freelance writers and critics in the business. A new hardcover collects a generous helping of highlights
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The New Testament!
/Some Penguin Classics are the only ones you can turn to when your city has incurred the wrath of the Almighty, as Boston so clearly has in this apocalyptic February of 2015, which has so far seen just a few inches short of 500 feet of snow. At such times, my book-hunting lapsed Catholic fingers […]
Read MoreBook Review: Simply Good News
/The latest book from New Testament scholar N. T. Wright presents a passionate new appraisal of the "good news " of the Christian Gospels
Read MoreBook Review: Amherst
/When a 21st-century woman travels to the hometown of Emily Dickinson, she finds herself caught between a passionate present and a past far more human than she imagined
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Book Review: The Great Zoo of China
/A small group of Americans visit a super-secret Chinese nature-park with a very unusual star attraction.
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Twentieth-Century Classics!
/Some Penguin Classics – as several of you readers have pointed out to me, hopeless bookworms that you are – revamp earlier Penguin Classics, as is certainly the case with the Penguin Modern Classics I just recently wrote about: the line is a kinda-sorta updating of Penguin’s old “Twentieth-Century Classics” line, a little shorter on […]
Read MoreBook Review: Gods, Guns, Grits, and Gravy
/Former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee offers a plea for understanding the 'flyover states' where, he claims, real people lead real lives
Read MoreBook Review: Thieves' Road
/Two years before he gained fame in the most painful way imaginable at the Battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer led a large expedition into the Black Hills sacred to the Sioux - in search of gold
Read MoreBook News: The Literary Hub!
/One item in the book news today is something you might have seen in the Wall Street Journal, a story with a dispiritedly wayward lede: Publishers have faced a vexing question in recent years: As newspapers’ book coverage shrinks and fewer people shop in brick-and-mortar bookstores, how might publishers open a conversation with readers online, […]
Read MoreBook Review: Turtle Face and Beyond
/The author of "Dogwalker" returns with a new collection of interlinked short stories that revel in their own straight-faced absurdity
Read MoreBook Review: Unbecoming
/In this arresting debut, a young woman working in Paris is hiding from her past - and she worries that the old friends she betrayed are hunting her.
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Modern Classics!
/Some Penguin Classics just look so nice! This has surely been noticed by the younger generation of printed-book buyers, whose Book Depository-roving eyes have been caught time and again by the recent redesign of the Penguin Modern Classics run. In a canny inversion of the now-venerable black-spined design of the main Penguin Classics line, these […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Dogs Are Eating Them Now
/One of the most experienced reporters to cover the war in Afghanistan writes up his experiences
Read MoreInk Chorus: Enemies of Promise!
/Our book today is Cyril Connolly’s 1938 masterpiece of snark and summation, Enemies of Promise, which largely baffled its critics when it first appeared and has survived them all, as Connolly himself sometimes predicted it would in his tipsier moments. The book is split into three long sections, the first, “The Predicament,” being a tour […]
Read MoreBook Review: Phantom Terror
/In his new book, historian Adam Zamoyski paints a picture of a Europe convulsed with fear of upheavals like the French Revolution and the tyranny of Bonaparte - and willing to do anything to prevent them
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