Saturday, May 23, 2015

Book Reviews - The New York Times

'The Daemon Knows'

"The Daemon Knows," Harold Bloom's newest work of oracular criticism, contains close readings of 12 writers, including Whitman, Melville, Emerson and Faulkner.
Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien: By the Book

The author, most recently, of "The Love Object" says Joyce staked his claim on Dublin, and it was left to Yeats, J. M. Synge and Beckett "to give us the landscape of the country in all its beauty, savagery, ghostliness and loneliness."

'England and Other Stories'

The stories in Graham Swift's collection find Englishmen at vulnerable points in their lives.

'Do No Harm'

A neurosurgeon's account combines biography, descriptions of operations and considerations of policy.

'The Book of Aron'

A poor family seeks opportunity in Warsaw, only to be swept up in the Nazi invasion.

'The Rocks'

A novel traces a couple's long estrangement, then their courtship.

'Women of Will' and 'Shakespeare and the Countess'

Were Shakespeare's women characters shaped by his personal experience?
Henry Folger, 1910.

'The Millionaire and the Bard'

Henry Folger set out to purchase as many First Folios as he could - and succeeded.
Mitchell studied his subjects - New York misfits of one sort or another - in painstaking detail.

'Man in Profile'

A biography of Joseph Mitchell attempts to explain one of literary history's "greatest disappearing acts."

'Medicine Walk'

In Richard Wagamese's novel, a young Indian and his ailing, estranged father venture into the wild.
Amelia Gray

'Gutshot'

These stories test the reader's ability to accept dark desires.

'The Distant Marvels'

Waiting out a hurricane, an old woman recounts her family's history in Cuba.
Bill Russell Edmonds

'God Is Not Here'

A former military adviser in Iraq struggles to adjust to postwar life after enduring the moral complexities of combat.

'The Familiar'

Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental novel - the first in a planned 27-part series - unfolds on the same rainy day in May.
Critic's Take

Subversive Pleasure

Angela Carter died in 1992, and many of the elements of her stories have become commonplace in fiction 

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