No matter how you slice it, Liz Moore has arrived. This month, an adaptation of her blockbuster novel “Long Bright River” started streaming on Peacock. And her next book, “The God of the Woods,” now on the best-seller list for 36 weeks (and counting), will soon hit the million mark in sales — a distinction … Read more
by David Szalay Szalay’s new novel traces the life of a young man in Hungary who eventually makes his way to England, following him from troubled youth to immigrant success to tragic fall. Each chapter provides glimpses of the major stages of adulthood — first love, marriage, parenthood — interwoven with intervals of aimlessness, reinvention … Read more
Linda Williams, a trailblazing scholar whose research was foundational to the field of film studies and to feminist film theory, and who wrote extensively about pornography, died on March 12 at her home in Lafayette, in Northern California. She was 78. Her husband, Paul Fitzgerald, said the cause was complications of a hemorrhagic stroke she … Read more
Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologist whose long career and wide-ranging social insights — which drew on Hindu texts, Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism, among many other ideas — made him a leading intellectual figure in both his native Sri Lanka and the rarefied world of Western academia, died on Tuesday at his home in Colombo, Sri … Read more
There are authors who stick to what they know, carving out careful niches for themselves. And then there are the ones who obliterate boundaries. Tanith Lee was in the second camp. An eclectic and prolific writer, she penned more than 90 novels and hundreds of short stories, ranging from fantasy and science fiction to horror, … Read more
SURREAL: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí, by Michèle Gerber Klein What is the value of a muse? That’s the central question of Michèle Gerber Klein’s biography of Gala Dalí, “Surreal.” Dalí was known as “the Mother of Surrealism,” the wife of Salvador, an adviser, a seductress. But as with so many influential women, her … Read more
Fortunately, Bev’s jagged relationship with her mother proves more complex. Even after she became a pioneering female lieutenant, Bev still failed to win approval from her traditional Ma, who considers wardenship unwomanly. (“Do you wish to be a man?” Ma asks in a flashback.) Nonetheless, Bev is married to her job, and she finds fulfillment … Read more
Dear readers, Do you know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut? The distinction rests on where the -naut was trained: Cosmonauts hail from Russia and astronauts from the United States, Canada, or Europe. Not China, though: The Chinese version is a taikonaut. If there exists another job with three different names of equally … Read more
by Alex Grecian ROSE OF JERICHO (Tor Nightfire, 335 pp., $28.99) continues what Grecian started with his 2023 novel “Red Rabbit,” and that’s a good thing. “Red Rabbit” introduced readers to Sadie Grace, who is wanted for witchcraft; Rabbit, the ward of a hunter who is tracking Sadie Grace; and Rose, a widow who eventually … Read more
