It’s once more around the block for Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping, complex saga about an adulterous heroine who loved too much and too well, ruining her reputation and wrecking her marriage while men winked and women wept (yes, they loved soap operas even on the Russian steppes). The story of Anna, the beautiful, unhappily Read More
It’s October 2008, the middle of the global financial apocalypse, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has kayaked to a private island. The most expensive government spending act in American history passed a day earlier, but now he’s hunting redfish. “I felt like myself for the first time in a long while,” he sighs in On Read More
As the Observer‘s Leon Neyfakh wrote this summer, the new (and old) translations of War and Peace are causing a raucous among the Russian literary elite. But the New York Review of Books’ Orlando Figes writes in his review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new version of Tolstoy’s classic that hating on Read More
In the Times’s new online book club, Reading Room, participants (including author Francine Prose, and frequent Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger) and moderator/Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus are debating a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another participant is Times executive editor Bill Keller, whose thoughts on the novel seemed not irrelevant Read More
Two new translations of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace will be published in the United States this fall, one claiming to be the definitive version and the other claiming to be the long lost, more accessible first draft.
The first translation, out on Knopf in October, is by all-stars Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It Read More
In the last installment of my serialized response to Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer’s long-lost and initially serialized novel, I promised to unveil what I felt was a primal Singerian vision revealing itself in Shadows . It’s a promise I’m going to make good on, a vision whose intimations are born out Read More
