A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates , by Blake Bailey. Picador, 675 pages, $35.
The real horror in reading any biography, whether it be a doorstop paean to a President or the brief life of a saint, is the subject’s dogged persistence in being, well, himself. This is partly a Read More
Platform, by Michel Houellebecq. Alfred A. Knopf, 259 pages, $25.
It’s tempting to believe that Michel Houellebecq is not Europe’s most widely read and hotly debated contemporary novelist but is, instead, the central character in an elaborate satire of the literary marketplace written by a French novelist a lot like Michel Houellebecq. From his droll Read More
A Brief and Risky Business:
Nine Who Nurtured Artists
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired , by Francine Prose. HarperCollins, 374 pages, $25.95.
First, a confession: Sometimes I think that Clio, the muse of history, has come to earth in the human form of Condoleezza Rice. Consider Read More
How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories , by Dorothy Gallagher. Random House, 187 pages, $22.95.
The blessing and the curse of the memoirist is that the story will be familiar to readers before the book is even cracked: parents growing older and stranger before they die; life presenting a bewildering Read More
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , by Dave Eggers. Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $23.
I know it’s insensitive to mention it, maybe even obscene, but the Brooklyn-based literary magazine McSweeney’s reminds me of Egypt Air Flight 990. Why exactly? Because McSweeney’s raises expectations skyward just to dash them in the sea, and the Read More
A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine , by Anka Muhlstein, translated from the French by Teresa Waugh. Helen Marx Books, 391 pages, $16.95.
One of my failings as a reader–and as a citizen–is a tendency to sympathize with doomed aristocrats. Given a choice between the democratic hordes at the barricades and Read More
The Night Inspector , by Frederick Busch. Harmony Books, 278 pages, $23.
One of the many pleasures of reading Edwin G. Burrows’ and Mike Wallace’s monumental Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 , which I hope to finish one day, is discovering how much our own New York has in common with Read More
