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| Featured Reviews |
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|  | Banville, John THE INFINITIES
February 15, 2010 - The Booker Prize-winning Irish author's 15th novel is a (perhaps excessively) droll romantic comedy reminiscent of both Shakespeare's gossamer romps and Iris Murdoch's playful metaphysical gameswomanship...It's an unexpected offering from the creator of such mordant psychodramas as Ghosts (1993), Eclipse (2001) and Shroud (2003), though mortality and all its disagreeable attributes are its subject
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| | Wouk, Herman THE LANGUAGE GOD TALKS
February 15, 2010 - In a crowded book market filled with self-serving and redundant theories about humankind's place in the grand scheme, it is rare to encounter an original, honest, charming voice. Such is the case with Wouk's latest work. The author's journey began with an innocent but daunting challenge from the great Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman
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| Current Issue: Fiction |
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 | Black, Robin IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS
March 01, 2010 - The death or impending loss of a loved one drives every narrative in this poignant collection. Jack Snyder's daughter Lila, blinded at six in a freak accident, is now 17 and poised for independence, but he's not really ready to give up being "The |
| McPhee, Martha DEAR MONEY
March 01, 2010 - No, the classic midlister is no household name, except in the households of some book reviewers, and perhaps in those of the few others who avidly monitor book reviews. Such a readership might represent a cult fandom and guarantee sales in the low |
| Pouncey, Maggie PERFECT READER
March 01, 2010 - The soul-searching of a willful daddy's girl who has just lost her father forms the core of Pouncey's accomplished novel, which weaves bookish themes into a getting-of-wisdom tale set in the fictional New England college town of Darwin. Only-child |
| Reiken, Frederick DAY FOR NIGHT
March 01, 2010 - Criticized for his books' many plot coincidences, Charles Dickens claimed that those who don't notice coincidence in their lives simply don't have their eyes open. Reiken seems to hold similar views on concatenation, dexterously using "coincidence" |
| Syjuco, Miguel ILUSTRADO
March 01, 2010 - This isn't the only recent debut that finds the author using his own name and drawing from his own life for his protagonist, but it dazzles as brightly as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The framing is simple, though nothing |
| Udall, Brady THE LONELY POLYGAMIST
March 01, 2010 - "There's hard things we have to do in this life," says a wizened desert rat to an existentially confused Golden Richards, the protagonist. "We bite our lip and do 'em. And we pray to God to help us along the way." Golden is in need of such guiding |
| Vida, Vendela THE LOVERS
March 01, 2010 - Like Vida's previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights' chilly Lapland, this story is set |
| Current Issue: Nonfiction |
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| Berman, Paul THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS
March 01, 2010 - The author begins with Islamic history as defined by its major players, including Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing from documents stored in government archives in the |
| Edmundson, Mark THE FINE WISDOM AND PERFECT TEACHINGS OF THE KINGS OF ROCK AND ROLL
March 01, 2010 - In this erudite, coming-of-age riot, the author deftly navigates the purgatorial rites of passage between university and professional life, developing insightful social critiques and candid self-evaluations along the way. After graduating from a |
| Waters, John ROLE MODELS
March 01, 2010 - Waters is known for his campy, often hilarious films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and the mainstream hit Hairspray (1988). In this consistently charming and witty collection of essays, he fondly remembers the many artists he has admired |
| Current Issue: Children's |
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| Almond, David THE BOY WHO CLIMBED INTO THE MOON
March 01, 2010 - Roald Dahl meets Antoine de Saint-Exupry in this delightfully improbable tale in which a previously unimaginative English boy named Paul surprises himself by declaring that the moon's just a hole in the sky. Paul, who gets more inventive by the |
| Baker, Keith LMNO PEAS
March 01, 2010 - A passel of industrious peas narrates inventive, alphabetically arranged avocations: "We are peas—alphabet peas! / We work and play in the ABCs." Amid towering, digitally textured capital letters, Baker's veggies, sprouting green arms, legs and |
| Devlin, Jane HATTIE THE BAD
March 01, 2010 - A theatrical girl with a penchant for being bad tries to be good in this wry exploration of the dynamics of behavior. As a little girl, Hattie had been "quite good" until she realized it involved doing boring things like eating mushy food and going |
| Dowell, Frances O'Roark FALLING IN
March 01, 2010 - A master at capturing the emotional lives of modern kids in realistic fiction proves equally adept with fantasy. When sixth-grader Isabelle Bean, the kind of "girl who is as silent as a weed," falls through the floor of a supply closet into what is |
| Emond, Stephen HAPPYFACE
March 01, 2010 - Moving easily between cartoons and painterly black-and-white illustration, this epistolary novel of a young teen's reinvention of self is subtle and effective. As he's stuck in his brother's shadow and in the middle of his alcoholic parents' unhappy |
| Engle, Margarita SUMMER BIRDS
March 01, 2010 - It's not often that someone is born both a great scientist and a great artist, especially if that someone is a girl in the middle of the 17th century. But Maria Sibylla Merian was. In a time when people thought that butterflies (then called "summer |
| Erskine, Kathryn MOCKINGBIRD
March 01, 2010 - This heartbreaking story is delivered in the straightforward, often funny voice of a fifth-grade girl with Asperger's syndrome, who is frustrated by her inability to put herself in someone else's shoes. Caitlin's counselor, Mrs. Brook, tries to |
| Henkes, Kevin MY GARDEN
March 01, 2010 - A little girl enjoys helping her mother in her garden, but she knows if she had a garden, it would be something else entirely: no weeds, ever-blooming multicolored flowers with hues she can change with just a thought, chocolate rabbits instead of |
| Isadora, Rachel SAY HELLO!
March 01, 2010 - Today Carmelita visits her Abuela Rosa, but to get there she must walk. Down Ninth Avenue she strolls with her mother and dog. Colorful shops and congenial neighbors greet them along the way, and at each stop Carmelita says hello—in Spanish, Arabic, |
| Turner, Megan Whalen A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS
March 01, 2010 - With each volume of this stellar series, the question arises anew: How will the text deceive its readers now that we're able to recognize Eugenides's lies? This time, it's through the first-person narration of Sophos, the excruciatingly honest (but |
| Wallenfels, Stephen POD
March 01, 2010 - This story presents an alien invasion from two unique viewpoints. Megs is 12, trapped alone in the parking garage of a Los Angeles hotel, forced to scrounge for food and water while avoiding alien spaceships outside and security guards who have |
| Wells, Dan I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER
March 01, 2010 - Fifteen-year-old John Wayne Cleaver knows he's different, but not because he has but one friend (and doesn't much like him) and not because he regularly helps out in his mother's mortuary. He's different because he recognizes the classic signs of an |
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| Online Exclusive
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| The Arabian Nights: A New Edition
March 01, 2010 - The most famous tales in The Arabian Nights have flown far beyond the confines of the night-shrouded bedroom in which Scheherazade spins stories to the vengeful king who will kill her come morning (unless she makes sure he just has to know what happens next). "There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories," writes Middle East scholar Robert Irwin in his introduction to Volume 2 of Penguin Classics' new three-volume edition. So should we care that Cambridge University scholars Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, for the first time since Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s, have based this English translation on the 1839-42 Arabic edition that contains more stories than any other, usually in fuller versions? We should
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