Review by David Starkey Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, winner of the Dazai Osamu Prize for a debut novel, is based on a simple yet irresistible premise. Shibata, the…
Category: Genres
Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya
Review by Walter Cummins For me, the essential advice Kieran Setiya offers in Life Is Hard is related to the distinction he makes between telic and atelic activities in the…
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
Review by Brian Tanguay As much as Louis Dejoy was in the media spotlight in the months before the presidential election of 2020, one might assume that no person as…
Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami
Review by Walter Cummins Novelist as a Vocation—Haruki Murakami’s collection of ten essays on novel writing, first published in Japan in 2015 but not translated into English until 2022—suggests that…
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
Review by David Starkey “Recitatif” is Toni Morrison’s only short story, and as she is one of the greatest novelists of the past fifty years, it deserves the careful attention…
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
Review by Brian Tanguay Mohsin Hamid doesn’t entertain simplistic themes or easily resolved problems in his novels. His first book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, dealt with the mistrust between the West…
The FSG Poetry Anthology Edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell
Review by David Starkey While no single publisher can, or should be, held responsible for bringing out all the important poetry in a country as diverse as ours, an argument…
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
Review by Walter Cummins The character of Gwendolen Kelling provides a form of ballast to Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. It’s not that she can prevent the criminality and murders—bodies…
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Review by David Starkey Patrick Radden Keeffe tells us in the Preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the twelve long-form…
Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
Review by David Starkey That Penguin Classics is publishing a new translation (by Allan Blunden) of a book packed with quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832,…