This is 85-year-old Edna O’Brien's first novel in 10 years, and in interviews, she has said that she found it difficult to write. One could argue that the violent history behind the novel added to her difficulty. For as she explains in a brief preface, the chairs of the title refer to the siege of…
Dorit Rabinyan's latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn't long…
Dorit Rabinyan's latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn't long…
Did the United States really need a French statue, especially one of colossal proportions? The visionary French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi thought that it did. And if it weren’t for Bartholdi and his generous nature—to say nothing of his creative idealism—there would be no Statue of…
In October 1940, the Germans, with help from the Poles, crammed 400,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto. They sealed off the ghetto from the rest of the city with six-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire, ensuring that few could escape. If any tried, they were seized, often by Polish “betrayers,”…
David Ferry’s latest poems look at the tantalizing possibility of life after death and the existence of God. But it’s a God that the poet doesn’t know and whose name escapes him. What he does know is that he feels a presence, and poems both hide and connect him to that presence. Or, as the…
As Chris Bohjalian tells it, the years between 1915 and 1923 were “the most nightmarish eight years of Armenian history.” Yet the horrific events of that time are generally not included in history courses, and are not so well known outside the Armenian community. No longer. Bohjalian describes what…
Michael Dirda, a longtime Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan, ascribes his critical abilities to Sherlock Holmes. He still remembers the spell cast on him when, during the 1950s in elementary school, he discovered The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with its cover “depicting a shadowy Something with…
Compass Rose
Unless It Moves the Human Heart
Cleopatra
Noah’s Compass
Annie's Ghosts
Attachment
Our Story Begins
Seizure
Toussaint Louverture
How to Read a Novel
Modigliani
The Gift of Valor