A history of ballooning

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The protagonist and narrator of E. L. Doctorow’s twelfth novel, Andrew’s Brain (Random House, $26), is a clumsy cognitive scientist who relates the story of his life from an undisclosed location…

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The Young Writer and the last literary celebrity

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A theory of glamour

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Can Amazon change its predatory ways?

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Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make It New” has long been cited as modernism’s driving objective. Yet Pound, in coining the phrase, was actually drawing on his own (rather free) translation of…

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The hope and hokum of immortality

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The poetry of Middle Eastern uprising

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The title of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), refers to “Lady Lazarus,” a poem Sylvia Plath wrote a few months before she committed…

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Thomas Pynchon goes online

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Filming Uganda’s homophobic fits

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Between 1985 and 1993, Bob Shacochis published two story collections and a novel, two of which were finalists for, and one of which won, the National Book Award. As literary…

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The unspent life of J. F. Powers

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Critiques of a life online

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At the end of a chapter on Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus, in Confronting the Classics (Liveright, $28.95), the Cambridge scholar Mary Beard reminds us that when…

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Love and marriage at the movies

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Jane Campion’s moral wilderness

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Peter Orner is a true writers’ writer, which is to say a writer writers complain to writers about readers not reading. His novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (a…

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A stroll through our cities

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Uncovering Iran’s coup

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The memoir is a tempting but treacherous form. As the English novelist Rachel Cusk writes in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20), “Unclothed, truth can be…

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Andrew Solomon’s exploration of difference

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C. S. Lewis once wrote that we must read the classics “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” Yet the briefest contact with the…

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Willa Cather’s correspondence

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No and the magic system of advertising

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In 1929, Robert Ripley was receiving nearly 3,000 letters a day. As Neal Thompson writes in A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not!”…

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The autumnal works of James Salter

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Is Marx still relevant?

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