Sometimes you can hear families muttering at each other in their dark and lonely enclosures. The words are like wounds that cannot heal because of huge regret or grievance, but the tone of the talk is so matter-of-fact, so casual, so bored. What are families for? They’re the people we talk and listen to, until Read More
The Ruins of California is a great title, even if it’s hard to know where a name like “Ruin” comes from—and actually, in California, people do still come from somewhere other than a scenarist’s treatment. Take Inez Ruin, a child in 1969 and the narrator of this book. She’s the daughter of divorce: Her mother, Read More
The Ruins of California is a great title, even if it’s hard to know where a name like “Ruin” comes from—and actually, in California, people do still come from somewhere other than a scenarist’s treatment. Take Inez Ruin, a child in 1969 and the narrator of this book. She’s the daughter of divorce: Her mother, Read More
For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering Read More
For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering Read More
At last, a life and an album about Lee Miller, one of the most beautiful women who ever lived—an account that’s generally free from the adoration, the caution and the flat-out evasion that have spoiled so many other books.
Yes, there could be more pictures—not just those Miller took herself at the end of Read More
At last, a life and an album about Lee Miller, one of the most beautiful women who ever lived—an account that’s generally free from the adoration, the caution and the flat-out evasion that have spoiled so many other books.
Yes, there could be more pictures—not just those Miller took herself at the end of Read More
Early on in John Banville’s new novel, Max, a man of about 60, takes his wife, Anna, to a medical specialist. “The consultant’s name was Mr. Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De’Ath, with that Read More
“Everyone in Venice is acting” are the first words of this book, and the opening has the feel or reach of fiction working in what the author insists is nonfiction. “I had been walking along Calle della Mandola,” says the author, “when I ran into Count Marcello.” And just like a wise, sardonic and not Read More
“Everyone in Venice is acting” are the first words of this book, and the opening has the feel or reach of fiction working in what the author insists is nonfiction. “I had been walking along Calle della Mandola,” says the author, “when I ran into Count Marcello.” And just like a wise, sardonic and Read More
