Robert Frank's The Americans

It’s a commonplace of anthropology that it often takes an outsider to show a group of insiders what it’s up to. One of the best books I know concerning Catholic pilgrimage in Europe, for instance, was written by a Jewish scholar from Brooklyn. One of the most compelling books ever written about the Arab world was written by a shy young man from the minor Irish nobility. An Italian Jesuit penetrated the mysteries of early modern China. And so on, all pointing to the fact that sometimes we need the Other to show us just how otherly we ...

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Artist of the Floating World

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Anniversaries: Foucault’s Pendulum

A bit of conspiracy theory to open this month of ides and signs and portents: For decades, a giant pendulum slowly swung inside the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology. When the museum was renovated to become the Museum of American History, the pendulum disappeared. Where did it go? And why, in those closing days of the Bush administration, did it go?

It was not just any pendulum. It was a Foucault pendulum, designed by a 19th-century French scientist to show the rotation of the Earth. Now, the physical world, ancient philosophers and modern scientists agree, is governed by ...

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Anniversaries: Commemorating Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath had acquired a modest reputation as a poet when she committed suicide 50 years ago, on February 11, 1963. Just 30 years old, she was as well known in England as the wife of the more famous poet Ted Hughes. That might have added to her depression, but she was far from stilled. Instead, in the six months preceding her death, she produced the stunning confessional poems collected in 1965 as Ariel, with their shocking equations: father as Nazi, husband as beast, society as prison.

Two weeks before her death, Plath’s novel The Bell Jar appeared under ...

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Utopias, Dystopias and 'Arcadia': A Conversation with Lauren Groff

Arcadia is a place somewhere up in the northern woods. Perhaps it's around Chautauqua, where 19th-century communards read each other poetry while fussing and feuding. Or maybe it neighbors the vales of the Burnt-Over District, where a dozen dissenting American religions sprang up. No matter the specifics, Arcadia is a place where you can feel the wind blowing from a distant Great Lake, a place where you can feel every barometric shift in the air of personal relations. It’s paradise, and it’s sometimes scary and weird—ripe ground, that is to say, for a skilled storyteller such ...

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Gillian Flynn on 'Gone Girl,' Toxic Marriages and Film Adaptations

“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.”

So opens Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, creepily enough. The tale of a disappearance and the web of suspicion it casts over a small town and its apparently orderly citizenry, Flynn's novel has met with both strong sales and critical praise. Kirkus praised it as “one of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it.” We recently caught up with Flynn to chat about her book and its fright-making qualities.

Browse more of the best thrillers of 2012

By all appearances ...

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Sherlock Holmes at 125

It was an inspired but utterly accidental moment when Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor struggling to establish himself both as a physician and as a writer in late Victorian London, drew upon the habits of an irascible medical school mentor to concoct a character that he pegged as a “consulting detective,” an utterly newfangled job description.

Doyle blended those habits with the conventions of a genre then only a few decades old—and pioneered by the then nearly forgotten American writer Edgar Allan Poe—to produce the figure he called Sherlock Holmes, rangy, distracted, drug-addicted, much more at home ...

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British Novelist Howard Jacobson on Being the Jewish Jane Austen

Howard Jacobson has been around for a good while, a student and creator of fine literature, but it seems as if he burst onto the literary scene only recently with a spate of rollicking novels about quotidian life in modern Britain, mostly as lived by men of a decidedly, well, shlimazel tenor. Those novels, among them No More Mr. Nice Guy, The Mighty Walzer, and The Finkler Question, have been famously well received both commercially and critically, the last earning Jacobson the Man Booker Prize.

His newest, Zoo Time, continues Jacobson’s travels into the picaresque that lies behind the ...

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Anniversaries: E.B. White’s 'Charlotte’s Web'

A certain school of thought in the study of animals holds that it’s an insult to all concerned to give them human qualities—the lion courage, for instance, or the hyena cunning. Considering that most humans are merely chimps with guns, that seems a reasonable objection to the practice of anthropomorphism, but it cuts rather deeply at the possibilities of literature, from a good moral-laden Aesopian fable down to the ultramodern pleasures of Frankenweenie.

Though an inveterate collector of notes taped up to every surface in sight, Elwyn Brooks White must not have received the memo nixing human qualities ...

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A Cornucopia of Surprises with Graphic Artist Chris Ware

Over the last quarter-century, Chris Ware has built a sterling reputation as a maker of graphic novels, some borrowing from their comic-book sources and some looking ahead into the museum galleries of the future, all working with themes of urban alienation. Small wonder that his new masterwork, Building Stories, finds Ware visiting a world of sometimes bewildered, sometimes unhappy people living in an overstuffed apartment building on the edge of downtown Chicago. All strive, but all endure.

Browse more of the top 25 fiction books of 2012

Recently, Kirkus caught up with Ware to ask him a few questions about ...

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Of Small Towns and Colonized People: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie

A book by Sherman Alexie—whether a novel, a screenplay or a book of poems—is always an event, and sometimes a long-awaited one: though Alexie is always busy, he publishes at a deliberate pace. Blasphemy, a generous selection of previously published short stories mixed with new ones, is a case in point; readers who came to know Alexie’s work through the early The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven will see in it two decades’ worth of artistic growth, while those new to him will find it a sweeping introduction to his work and all its intelligence ...

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Christopher Hitchens Faces Mortality

Twenty-odd years ago, when he was in my town for a reading, I asked Allen Ginsberg that most unbearable of questions for a working writer: “What are you working on?” His answer? “Deathwork.”

He meant by that, I think, the Buddhist practice of paving the way for one’s own passing by getting soul and karma in shape for it. By way of Western practicality, too, he meant disposing of papers—he would soon sell his 300,000-object archives to Stanford University, igniting a minor controversy by doing so—and otherwise scheduling in what some wise soul once summed up ...

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‘Hostage’: A Conversation with Elie Wiesel

A longtime professor of literature and notable survivor of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel is the author some 50 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the famed memoir Night, many addressing philosophical and moral issues surrounding the use of state terror in the last century.

With his latest, Hostage, he moves to the more personal scale of a relatively nameless—or at least certainly not politically prominent—Jewish writer who is kidnapped from his Brooklyn home by terrorists and subjected to a kind of stateless trial even as he awaits what is almost certain to be a death sentence. We spoke ...

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Imposing Visions: Remembering Art Critic and Writer Robert Hughes (1938–2012)

Robert Hughes, who died in a Bronx hospital on Aug. 6, should by all rights have died 13 years earlier, on the evening of May 30, 1999, at the hour when “it was still daylight, but only just.” So he tells us, for it was then, as he writes in the opening page of his luminous memoir Things I Didn’t Know, out on a desert highway in Western Australia, that a passenger sedan hurtled from out of nowhere and plowed into Hughes’ car, the combined speed of the two vehicles 140 mph.

Read more books by Robert Hughes.

Hughes ...

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Gore Vidal (1925–2012): A Patrician Gadfly Leaves the Stage

Gore Vidal, like his contemporaries Louis Auchincloss and William F. Buckley, was of an American type that is now almost extinct: the bookish aristocrat, thoroughly well educated at the best schools and thoroughly well traveled, connected to all the right people, capable of summoning up a fragment from Proust or a jotting from the notebooks of Adams and Jefferson in an instant.

Read more reviews of books by Gore Vidal.

All three took their duties as spokesmen for that culture seriously, noblesse being obliged to do so. But Vidal’s mission was all the more charged—not only was he ...

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Now Wait Just a Minute…with Frank Partnoy

Is there anyone in the world who isn’t in a terrible rush to get somewhere, do something, see someone? We pay a price for the mad hurry that is life today, from mild jitters to debilitating stress to the inability to remember or focus on much of anything.

Frank Partnoy, a close student of things financial (Infectious Greed, 2003), turns his attention to the pace of life, and its psychological and social implications in his Wait: The Art and Science of Delay.

Browse more of the best nonfiction of 2012.

Dogs that don’t eat the biscuits that are ...

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Paul Theroux’s 'Lower River' Returns to Familiar—if Exotic—Ground

Nostalgia is a killer: It can lull us off guard, lead us into the dangers that come when, deep in age, we romanticize things like a ropeless climb or a seatbeltless swerve around a mountain road and decide to try the foolhardiness of bygone days again.

At the very least, nostalgia, as the waggish Peter De Vries once said, isn’t what it used to be—and what it used to be is a business that involves putting fresh paint over peeling walls, fresh carpet over a whole lot of mildew.

Read more books by Paul Theroux. 

When Ellis Hock ...

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Carlos Fuentes, 1928–2012

Carlos Fuentes, the novelist and essayist, died Tuesday at the age of 83 in Mexico City. He foresaw ending his days there, much as the Peruvian poet César Vallejo prophesied that he would die in Paris, but we must imagine that Fuentes might have preferred to leave this plane in Providence or London or, yes, Paris, all places in which he had lived over the course of a long life. For, though proudly and definitively Mexican, Carlos Fuentes was always a bit of an outsider in his homeland.

Read more reviews of Carlos Fuentes books.

Born in Panama, the ...

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Taxing Reads

Tax time is upon us, and with it the scramble to fill out forms, fill in the blanks and, if need be, make up convincing stories about what did or did not happen.

Read more new and notable fiction this April.

Taxation and the people involved on either side of the enterprise haven’t figured widely in literature, save of the do-it-yourself variety. We have the biblical stories of the publican Saul and the tax collector Matthew, of course, and the mighty satire of Nikolai Gogol’s tale The Overcoat.

Another Russian-language writer, Chingiz Aitmatov, worked as a tax collector ...

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J.G. Ballard, Dystopian Master

Walt Disney, spinner of fairy tales, had an early life that no child should dream of—poverty, alcohol and war all figured into the equation. Disney shrugged it off and, while serving as an ambulance driver during World War I, spent his free time improving on the bullet holes and blood inside German helmets and dreaming of Main Street.

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J.G. Ballard, the anti-Disney of our time, also had a spectacularly difficult boyhood as a prisoner of Japan, as he would record in his memoir Empire of the Sun. His dreams of High Street would ...

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