Book Review: The Butcher's Trail
/In the wake of the strife and collapse of Slobodan Mlosevic's Yugoslavia, a large group of war criminals had to be hunted down and delivered for trial. A riveting new book tells the story.
Read MoreComics! Secret Wars Concludes!
/It’s been a long time, and a lot of water has gone under the proverbial bridge since Marvel’s latest mega-event “Secret Wars” mini-series began its nine-issue run back in 2007. Writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic launched the event – in which some kind of universe-killing singularity wipes out the entire continuity of the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Justifying Genocide
/A powerful new book looks at the ideological connections between the Armenian Genocide and the Nazi death-camps that followed twenty years later
Read MoreThe Illustrated Tennyson!
/Our book today is a grand Victorian thing, an illustrated 1884 edition of the poems of Tennyson published by dear old James Osgood & Co. on Tremont Street in Boston. This is an appreciation, a tribute to the 19th century’s greatest poet; it has no critical apparatus of any kind and certainly cannot be consulted […]
Read MoreBook Review: Jakob's Colors
/The Nazi slaughter of hundreds of thousands of European gypsies forms the grim backdrop to Lindsay Hawdon's debut novel
Read MoreRomance Roundup: January 2016!
/As we’ve mentioned here at Stevereads before, the tactic some Romance authors take of anchoring their stories geographically seems extremely popular with the core readership. I find this more confusing than not, since, after all, the traditional modern view of romance is that it’s something most likely to take root and flourish in foreign soil […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Bands of Mourning
/In the latest novel from hyper-prolific Brandon Sanderson, the vast mythos of his "Cosmere" is further expanded
Read MoreAn Island Summer!
/Our book today is Walter Magnes Teller’s An Island Summer from 1951, his sentiment-infused reminiscence of a “happy family holiday” on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and four children. The book, illustrated by Donald McKay, follows the adventures of the Teller family as they take the ferry and make their way to the Paint Box, […]
Read MoreBook Review: George Washington's Journey
/In his first term as president, George Washington packed up and went on long, rattling tours of the new United States, to see the people and let them see him. A new book follows along.
Read MoreThe Perils of Parody in the Penny Press!
/It’s hard to miss the cover of the latest Esquire on the newsstands. It’s a stark, ugly black-and-white close up of Donald Trump’s face, under the banner “Hater in Chief.” And the issue’s contents are politically weighted, in ways virtually guaranteed to irk me – especially the magazine’s specious, irritating accompanying “news survey” about rage […]
Read MoreBook Review: What Belongs to You
/An American instructor in Bulgaria falls into a problematic infatuation with a rough-hewn rent-boy in Garth Greenwell's debut novel
Read MoreMoorehead’s Gallipoli!
/Our book today was a very thoughtful gift! The little old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold recently tapped out her pin money onto the kitchen table, put on her finest bonnet, tottered around the corner to her favorite second-hand bookstore, Puss-in-Books, and procured for me a plastic-wrapped […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Norton Critical Lazarillo de Tormes
/The great Renaissance classic gets a spryly-translated new Norton edition
Read MoreInk Chorus: Malcolm Cowley!
/Our book today is The Portable Malcolm Cowley, a compendious volume from 1990 edited by Donald Faulkner that’s one of the best entries in the wonderful Viking Portable Library series not only because it brings together a treasure-pile of great stuff but also because, in Cowley’s case, that assemble stuff is the very essence of […]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
/Some Penguin Classics remain obstinately unclassifiable, no matter how many times you read them. Look, for instance, at Penguin’s 1986 paperback of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the deeply, deceptively strange 1904 work by Henry Adams. On the surface, it looks like a passionately impressionistic travelogue of the type that was enormously popular at the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Blood & Steel
/In the third century, the Roman Empire teetered on the brink of implosion, with one man after another claiming power - and Harry Sidebottom's "Throne of the Caesars" series transmutes it all into first-rate historical fiction
Read MoreAttending Oxford: The Expedition of Cyrus!
/The Oxford University Press, centuries old and the biggest academic press in the world, founded its World’s Classics series in 1906 (having bought the imprimatur lock, stock, and barrel from the brilliant publisher Grant Richards in 1901). For over a hundred years, the line has produced reasonably-priced and expertly-edited canonical texts, proving that great and […]
Read MoreBook Review: Beyond Greek
/A provocative new book re-examines the startling power and, yes, originality of Roman literature
Read MoreComics! Obi-Wan & Anakin!
/The onslaught of new Marvel Comics titles set in the world of Star Wars will now flow unabated, thanks to the grotesque, obscene box office success of the new Star Wars move, The Force Awakens (as of this writing, the movie has grossed over one trillion dollars and been officially inducted into the official liturgy […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Happy Marriage
/A bedridden famous painter reflects on his unhappy marriage - and his wife gets the last word
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