Atlantic Unbound Archive

B. R. Myers

Recent articles by B. R. Myers

January/February 2009

Mercy!

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

November 14, 2008

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."

September 23, 2008

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."

April 2008

Keeping a Civil Tongue

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

December 2007

A Bright Shining Lie

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

September 2007

Hard to Swallow

The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.

June 2006

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.

April 2006

Touch of Evil

A selective investigation of recent mysteries and thrillers.

November 2005

The Prisoner of Cool

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

September 2005

If Pigs Could Swim

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

May 2005

A Bag of Tired Tricks

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

April 2005

Tradecraft

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

September 2004

Mother of All Mothers

The leadership secrets of Kim Jong Il.

April 2004

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.

July/August 2001

A Reader's Manifesto

An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose.