Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” and “The Secret History,” and Helen Oyeyemi’s “Boy, Snow, Bird” are not “literary realism” but something different, and dazzling.
Histories of the Cold War era, novels by authors new and not-so-new, meditations on spirituality: These are some of the works discussed by our Christmas critics.
Dinaw Mengestu’s novel considers what it is to walk around in an America that holds no promise for you, while Matt Fraction elevates the comic book to new heights.
Readers interested in Russia and Ukraine, CIA analysts and Soviets, Doctor Zhivago censorship, and more will enjoy these fascinating histories of the Cold War.
To her fans—and there are many, from critic James Wood to Barack Obama—Robinson shows that old-fashioned virtues like seriousness and simplicity are still virtues.
No one predicted that the most striking literary phenomenon of the early twenty-first century would be this six-volume novel by a Norwegian writer, about himself.
In James Carroll’s latest, Jesus actually—now as for the apostles—emerges from within the long, recurring history of Jewish persecution and bereavement.
Sexual misdeeds, false identities, cult worship, theft, and murder; if this astonishing tale were not true, it could be the work of an accomplished mystery writer.
Francis Fukuyama’s new book examines the rise and decline of the American political system in the broader history of democratic process, intelligently & enjoyably.
Written with the school’s cooperation, this history recounts the story of Regis High School warts-and-all, including the intrigues surrounding its founding.
John E. Thiel’s theological writing has always combined poise and a sense of urgency, and this intricately argued treatise on eternal life is no exception.
Almost every poem in Joshua Mehigan’s collection contains a striking formal moment, where he uses meter or rhyme or line break to do something surprising.
A rich and detailed account of Bonhoeffer’s immensely eventful life—the personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey that ended in a Nazi concentration camp.
Alison is trying to administer a radical corrective to how the faith is often presented, and he backs it up with a sophistication that usually justify his excesses.
In trying to make sense of recurring “strange” episodes of altered consciousness in her life—similar to those of mystics—atheist Barbara Ehrenreich discovers limits.
Jennifer Senior’s ‘All Joy and No Fun’ is more serious than its playful cover implies. Why do people have children at all now that having them is not a necessity?
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the most eloquent religious figures of the twentieth century—a “jeweler of words,” in the estimation of one colleague.
As Donal Cooper and Janet Robson show in this fascinating study, the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi played a crucial part in promoting Francis and his mission.
The Second Vatican Council isn’t over yet, in the view of Robert P. Imbelli, who notes that the “reception,” and thus the event of the council, is continuing today.
With humor at the fore, ‘Lost for Words’ seems to arrive as a self-imposed respite from investigating the traumas of St. Aubyn’s autobiographical Patrick Melrose.
The collapse of establishment Protestantism as the American civil religion, Bottum asserts, has left a deep void that sends ripples of unease through the culture.
