There’s a tendency among book readers and book critics alike to use the phrases “summer reading” and “beach reading” somewhat interchangeably, as if the only books published between the months of May and August were penned by the likes of James Patterson (who does, incidentally, have a new novel, Sail, coming out in June).
Neglected in [...]

Just more than one year ago, America lost one of its finest writers – one of the world’s finest writers – of the 20th century.
Kurt Vonnegut’s death on April 11, 2007 did not exactly come as a shock – he was, after all, 84 years old. For many of Vonnegut’s readers, however, facing a world [...]

Who would have guessed in 1991 that the post-Cold War era would last only a decade? That, just less than 10 years later, an even more momentous event than the collapse of the Soviet Union would come to shape the lives of our generation? The enormity of Sept. 11, 2001, is now almost utterly uncontested [...]

Let me tell you a little something about how the book-criticism business works. I don’t pay for the books I review. Sometimes, publishers send me a copy unsolicited, but most of the time I request a review copy directly from the publisher. There’s no set system for how I choose the books I’m going to [...]

 Authors, like members of any other profession, have their own quirks and specialties. For instance, Dickens was particularly good at crafting memorable characters, while Hemingway is worth reading for the sound and rhythm of his prose style alone. Other writers specialize in particularly intricate plots, forceful ironies, or countless other literary foci. Steven Millhauser does [...]

Last month, Bill Cosby co-published “Come on People,” a book criticizing the black community. Read a review.