The great danger of the clergyman in fiction is that his doctrinal belief will leak into the root system of the novel and turn argument into piety, drama into sermon... read more
For a while, during the Gay Nineties of their respective centuries, the American writer Henry James and the Irish writer Colm Toibin -- whose remarkable new novel is about James -- were faced with the same embarrassing problem... read more
There is a solid tradition in American letters of novels like this, phantasmagoric pictures of a United States whose every promise has been turned upside down... read more
I want to circle around Munro's latest marvel of a book, "Runaway," by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame... read more
This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times... read more
This would seem on the surface of things most unlikely. Neither notably eccentric nor charismatic, Yu Yuan is not an especially vivid personality... read more
For him to turn memoirist is a mustache of another sort, since calculated image-tending dominates the agenda here even more than it did in this year's only other comparably bruited autobiography,.. read more
