B. R. Myers
Recent articles by B. R. Myers
Mercy!
Toni Morrison’s new historical novel is a monotonous series of flashbacks, larded with anachronisms.
North Korea: Nothing Has Changed
"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."
After Kim Jong Il
"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."
Keeping a Civil Tongue
An English critic decries the decline of his language—and his civilization.
A Bright Shining Lie
It’s the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall. And it’s astonishingly bad.
Hard to Swallow
The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.
A Man of Action
His narration may be clunky and his sex scenes almost comical, but Alan Furst’s turns of plot can leave a reader breathless.
Touch of Evil
A selective investigation of recent mysteries and thrillers.
The Prisoner of Cool
Elmore Leonard's talents have increasingly become cooped up in his hallmark tough-guy aesthetic.
If Pigs Could Swim
Why our farm animals would be better off on the other side of the Atlantic.
A Bag of Tired Tricks
Blank pages? Photos of mating tortoises? The death throes of the postmodern novel.
Tradecraft
Rightly championed for decades by genre and literary readers alike, John le Carré has written a novel that may appeal to neither camp.
Mother of All Mothers
The leadership secrets of Kim Jong Il.
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Our author finds Jeffrey Masson's "divertingly amateurish" style likely to broaden the audience for the animal-rights movement in a way that Peter Singer and Matthew Scully never could.
A Reader's Manifesto
An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose.