October 1, 2006
“To Become Something Broken”: Jorie Graham’s Overlord
Overlord by Jorie Graham. New York: Ecco, 2005. 91 pp. $22.95. During times of war, we think of other wars, and why they continue, even if we think we […]
October 1, 2006
The Casual Reader
Melville: His World and Work by Andrew Delbanco. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 448 pp. $30.00. In the 1840s New York City had a population of six hundred thousand, […]
July 1, 2006
Uncle Grisha Was Right
Brodsky. A Personal Memoir by Ludmila Shtern. Fort Worth: Baskerville, 2004. 386 pp. $25.95. From Russian with Love: Joseph Brodsky in English by Daniel Weissbort. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004. […]
July 1, 2006
On the Several Home Fronts: Song Among Magyar Contemporaries
In Quest of the “Miracle Stag “: The Poetry of Hungary, Volume II. An Anthology of Hungarian Poetry in English Translation from the Start of the 20th Century to the […]
July 1, 2006
The Casual Reader
Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.—Ruth Rendell I have never read War and Peace. Nor have I read The Magic Mountain, James Frey’s now-infamous A Million […]
July 1, 2005
The Ardent Pen of Vernon Lee
Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography by Vineta Colby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 432 pp. $39.50. Hopeful visitors to Florence in the early twentieth century, eager to absorb […]
January 1, 2005
Love and Death, and Animals Too
Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. Viking, 2003. 233 pages. $21.95. I first encountered Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous central character of J. M. Coetzee’s latest fiction, not within its […]
January 1, 2005
The Achievement of Robert Lowell
Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 1187 pages. $45.00. The publication of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems […]
July 1, 2004
A Light Touch
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A new verse translation by W. S. Merwin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. xxiv, 171 pp. $22.00 hardcover. This is W. S. […]
July 1, 2004
Virtues of Ambition
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 290 pp. $24.00. Ashoke Ganguli rides a train from Calcutta to visit his grandfather, a retired professor of European […]
January 1, 2004
‘Jealous of Dead Leaves’: The Reach of the Living Sonnet
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Orgel, with an introduction by John Hollander. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. 208 pp. $4.95. A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850. […]
April 1, 2003
The Goldilocks Formula
The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer. New York: Faber & Faber, 2002. 374 pp. $16.00. In an early essay, Susan Sontag expressed admiration—or was it dismay?—at playwright Peter Weiss’s “staggering […]