2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Farrar Straus and Giroux,
898 pages, $30
Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five Read More
NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS
By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Yale University Press, 293 pages, $26
SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR
By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Doubleday, 206 pages, $21.95
THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES
By Leonard Mlodinow
Pantheon, 252 pages, Read More
PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS
By Dan Ariely
HarperCollins, 245 pages, $25.95
I missed the deadline with this book review. Although I had plenty of time to work on it (having pitched it in December), I procrastinated and ultimately pulled an all-nighter to get it in. Read More
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO
By Junot Díaz
Riverhead, 340 pages, $24.95
We’ve waited a long time for a novel from Junot Díaz. The Dominican-American author blasted the publishing world in 1996 with Drown, a book of short stories mainly about the macho scrambling of Dominican immigrants in industrial New Jersey. Read More
"God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books.” This wistful observation comes from an aging, drunken, failed poet in The Savage Detectives, the grand novel that made Roberto Bolaño famous in Latin America when it was published in 1998. The tension between vitality and Read More
Office life—that Beckettian game of Whac-a-Mole—is the subject of Then We Came to the End, an amusing debut novel from Joshua Ferris. Told in the collective first-person, a know-it-all “we” (like The Virgin Suicides), this is a book about the disposable, often awkward, sometimes precious, usually tedious moments of the workday. “How we hated our Read More
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95.
With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Read More
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95.
With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, Read More
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely satisfying memoir, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. The book traps us in the overactive, lovesick mind of a Read More
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely satisfying memoir, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. The book traps us in the overactive, lovesick mind of a Read More
