Last week, I came across a piece by Sarah Lyall in the Times about an English mystery-writer, Janice Hallett — I hadn’t heard of her — who has much of spent of her life as a writer-for-hire, with a specialty in beauty-aid copy. When Hallett tried her hand at screenplays, she was urged to write …
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans, is a useful book. Reading it, I thought of it as a sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nazis. In the ordinary course of reading history, we are obliged to compose, in our own mind, the full story of each leading player’s career …
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The Faces of the Third Reich
by Richard J Evans’ »
Ordinary Human Failings is an ingenious novel that masks its significance in its format. It starts out with what seems to be the makings of a sensational tabloid story, and its narrative framework follows the attempt of journalist Tom Hargreaves to extract that story from the family that’s likely to be responsible for it. His efforts …
The young American, Silas Q Scuddamore, is in a spot. In his bedroom at a hotel in Paris, he has discovered a corpse. Luckly, a doctor is lodging in the next room, and the doctor comes up with a plan. The plan is smooth but all the same somewhat hard to believe. Scuddamore protests: “Alas!” …
What is the origin of consciousness? The Hebrew Bible has a simple answer that everybody knows: it involves an apple. Of course it doesn’t involve an apple per se; apples are northern fruit that do not grow in the Levant. Figs would be more likely. The Hebrew Bible, and the Old Testaments, in no matter …
The Princess of 72nd Street is a historical novel, first published in 1979 and very much of its time, which I remember as a period of open confusion. What followed may not have been much of an improvement for many people, but it was relatively straightforward, and things have only gotten more straightforward since; today, alas, …
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by Elaine Kraf’ »
A friend whom I see every week, and with whom I always discuss what we’re reading, has been saying pretty much the same thing for over a month: she’s reading another Joe Pickett novel by C J Box. She can’t stop. I’m not surprised: a mystery set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, centered on …
On a tip from a friend, I read Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel, The Anthropologists. Savaş is a Turkish writer, educated in the United States, who writes in English. She now lives in Paris. The Anthropologists is her third novel. I thought that, before writing about it, I would read the second novel, Walking on the Ceiling. The …
Is the subtitle of this new book, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America really plausible? Even if it’s safe to assume — and I think that it is — that Jones was among the three or four most influential editors in the history of the Knopf imprint, there remains the question of just how …
Like everyone who has read Brooklyn, I was pleased to read more about the American adventures of Eilis Lacey in Colm Tóibín’s Long Island,. But when, at the end of the first part of the new novel, Eilis left Long Island for Ireland — for the duration — and bumped into her oldest friend in Enniscorthy, I …