When I was in public school, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Rosewood, 20th-century lynchings, American concentration camps, and numerous other dark and ugly episodes in American history were ignored or glossed over. Upon more serious study, this disconcerting series of revelations casts a long and heavy shadow over the concept
George Lakoff, who is involved in something called cognitive linguistics purports to explain the science behind our political decision-making and, more to the point for Lakoff, how to put that science in the service of progressive political forces.
Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in her home country) on Indian-Australian professor Tom Loxley, who is completing a book on Henry James but is preoccupied
David Wroblewski’s debut novel opens with mute Edgar Sawtelle living with his family in remote northern Wisconsin. The idyll is upset by Edgar’s father’s death and young Edgar’s suspicion that his uncle had a hand in his father’s death. Trying but failing to prove his
New York University professor Darin Strauss’s (The Real McCoy) new novel sets aside his past interest in limning American history for a story set in contemporary America, more specifically Long Island. Josh Goldin, a media salesman, is embroiled in a battle to keep his infant son as local authorities
I have found Gore Vidal variously incisive, opaque, riveting, infuriating, brilliant, prescient, amusing, and just plain entertaining. Thus, this interview was so very satisfying (as well as edifying).
Author and filmmaker Russell Banks (The Reserve, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), who has 16 well-crafted novels under his belt, ventures into nonfiction with this meditation on the origins of America. Banks has never been reticent about his progressive leanings and gives them full license in this offhanded critique of
Considering the novelty and power of Walt Whitman’s liberating appeal to a broad swath of society, it is not surprising that he awakened and engendered strong devotion from a plethora of followers and devotees. This book traces the activities of some of his most avid associates: Anne Gilchrist, John
Honduran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (El asco, La diabla en el espejo), author of eight novels, five collections of short fiction, and one book of essays, and currently a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote this story (first published in Spanish in 2004) of an alcoholic writer hired to
Amazingly, I am always catching the impressive Margot Livesey’s (Banishing Verona) novels on the run. Or as excerpts in The New Yorker. Or something like that. I mention this by way of pointing out the powerful magnetic pull of Livesey’s prose. Her new opus is no different—immediately
