B. R. Myers

A professor spends a season in hell.

Why the latest hyped-up work of staggering genius fizzles

The brilliant foreignness of Australian crime fiction

Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony.

Patrick Hamilton’s exceptional, and overlooked, novels show that falling in love with the wrong person is misery—and it isn’t much fun for the wrong person either.

Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen.

Henry de Montherlant’s work displays the charms of a black-hearted misogynist.

Bill Clinton may have secured the release of two American journalists, but as our correspondent, a South Korea-based professor of North Korean studies, reports, his trip to Pyongyang has troubling consequences too.

Toni Morrison’s new historical novel is a monotonous series of flashbacks, larded with anachronisms.

"To hope that a new administration in Washington can build trust with the North Koreans where their most sympathetic blood-brethren have so abjectly failed would be to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme."

"We should be thinking less about the transition of North Korean power, and more about the worldview that Kim and his potential successors have in common."

An English critic decries the decline of his language—and his civilization.

It’s the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall. And it’s astonishingly bad.

The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms

His narration may be clunky and his sex scenes almost comical, but Alan Furst’s turns of plot can leave a reader breathless

A selective investigation of recent mysteries and thrillers

Elmore Leonard's talents have increasingly become cooped up in his hallmark tough-guy aesthetic

Why our farm animals would be better off on the other side of the Atlantic

Blank pages? Photos of mating tortoises? The death throes of the postmodern novel

Rightly championed for decades by genre and literary readers alike, John le Carré has written a novel that may appeal to neither camp