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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Slaughterhouse Rules
A professor spends a season in hell.
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Alex Nabaum A Swing and a Miss
Why the latest hyped-up work of staggering genius fizzles
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Jesse Lenz Down Underworld
The brilliant foreignness of Australian crime fiction
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John Cuneo The Moral Crusade Against Foodies
Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony.
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Jesse Lenz Men Who Love Too Much
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.
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George Bates Smaller Than Life
Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen.
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Liza Corbett Monster of Marriage
Henry de Montherlant’s work displays the charms of a black-hearted misogynist.
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The Korea Trap
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.
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Mercy!
Toni Morrison’s new historical novel is a monotonous series of flashbacks, larded with anachronisms.
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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."
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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."
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Keeping a Civil Tongue
An English critic decries the decline of his language—and his civilization.
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A Bright Shining Lie
It’s the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall. And it’s astonishingly bad.
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Hard to Swallow
The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms
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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
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Touch of Evil
A selective investigation of recent mysteries and thrillers
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The Prisoner of Cool
Elmore Leonard's talents have increasingly become cooped up in his hallmark tough-guy aesthetic
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If Pigs Could Swim
Why our farm animals would be better off on the other side of the Atlantic
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A Bag of Tired Tricks
Blank pages? Photos of mating tortoises? The death throes of the postmodern novel
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Tradecraft
Rightly championed for decades by genre and literary readers alike, John le Carré has written a novel that may appeal to neither camp
