Yale Review by David Starkey Anyone familiar with the wry and tricksy stories of Lydia Davis will not be surprised that in Into the Weeds—her book-length response to the question…
Category: Memoir & Biography
The Art of Becoming a Citizen: a memoir by Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay It’s the autumn of 1961 and twenty-four-year-old Gail Godwin is in New York City, living temporarily at the Martha Washington Hotel on East Thirtieth Street.…
Dickens in Brooklyn by Jay Neugeboren
Eastover Review by Walter Cummins I met Jay Neugeboren at the book launch for a mutual friend after knowing about his writing for years. We shook hands and had a…
The Norton Lectures Centenary Editions
Harvard Review by David Starkey The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University are, if not the most famous, then certainly among the most famous lectures in American letters. Established…
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly
Norton Review by David Starkey Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes…
The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom
Chicago Review by David Starkey Is Albert Camus’s most famous novel, The Stranger, a bit too programmatic? Is The Plague, which I reviewed during COVID, a bit too long? Is…
The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins The image of Alfred Tennyson I’ve carried for decades goes back to the childhood card game of Authors that depicts him with a stately continence…
Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Andrew Burstein
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay It’s fair to say that Thomas Jefferson fascinates historians. The sheer number of biographies of America’s third president is staggering, and one might wonder what…
A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On by Stephen Policoff
Heliotrope Review by Lisa Del Rosso A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On by Stephen Policoff, is a memoir about the loss of…