The Best Books of 2021: History
/
The best history volumes published by popular presses, academic presses, and specialty presses this year challenge the status quo.
Read More
Books! Titus and More!
/
Well!
Not only has my general-reading palate been cleansed by a couple of pretty good teen novels (although further reflecting has made me think less of Saint Iggy, mainly because it has an almost bewilderingly unsatisfying ending) and one great science fiction novel, but now my very specific HISTORY palate has also been cleansed! Soldiers & Ghosts by J. E. Lendon was great!
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Shahnameh!
/
Some Penguin Classics, as I’ve noted before here at Stevereads, feel like they’re a long time in the making, and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi more than most and in two different ways. Not only has this sprawling tenth century Persian epic waited a long time for an attractive, affordable paperback edition in English, but this particular text, a prose translation by Dick Davis that Viking brought out ten years ago, has waited a long time to become a Penguin Classic.
Read MoreAuthor & Book Essays: The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat
/
A debatably wise man once said that the best-seller was a gilded tomb for a mediocre talent. As with all easy aphorisms, it’s only 90 percent true.
The riddle is solved one of two ways: either the writer of the best-seller stumbled blindly upon a winning formula that one time only, or the writer always knew what they were doing and some combination of chance and synergy caused that one book to take flight.