In popular Irish mythology it’s often said that the seeds of the Celtic Tiger were sown shortly after Italia ’90, when the country’s team reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup soccer tournament for the first time. THE GUTS, by Roddy Doyle. Jonathan Cape, ...

What if the long-term survival of the human race depended on thousands of Americans being relocated to a vast underground city, with giant TV screens broadcasting a desolate landscape outside and no one allowed to leave? SHIFT, by Hugh Howey. Arrow, 2013, 608 pp., ...

Life is a career that none of us chose. The rich and credulous hire life coaches to flatter them. Others who crave enlightenment can sign on to the School of Life set up by entrepreneurial egghead Alain de Botton. LIFE LESSONS FROM … Bergson, ...

In “You Only Live Twice” (1964), the 12th in Ian Fleming’s series of James Bond novels, a perplexed Tiger Tanaka, MI5′s Japanese secret police liaison, informs 007 he was unaware that ninjas still existed. JAPANTOWN, by Barry Lancet. Simon and Schuster, 2013, 416 pp., ...

For most readers, Japanese literature may suggest romantic/erotic works by Nagai Kafu, elegantly classical and humorously or sinisterly “kinky” fiction by Tanizaki, or coolly stylish contemporary works by Haruki Murakami. For such readers, this volume will come as a shock — both refreshing and ...

Outnumbering dogs by roughly three to one worldwide, cats have been the world’s most popular pet for a long time, but right now, in particular, they seem to be enjoying a golden era — possibly their most golden since the days of ancient Egypt, ...

In the acknowledgements section of his strange new group biography of six famous musicians who died at the age of 27, Howard Sounes writes about setting out “to see what, if anything, the 27 Club amounts to apart from a series of coincidental and ...

I don’t remember hearing the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in March, or any of his fellow Argentinian Jesuits when I was in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They seemed strangely silent in such harrowing times when ...

This is the third in Margaret Atwood’s science fiction trilogy, which started with “Oryx and Crake” and progressed to “The Year of the Flood.” The title of the third, MaddAddam, you will notice, is a palindrome. There is plenty of wordplay to come. MADDADDAM, ...

The title of this book is exquisite, while the cover illustration is of something else, different yet just as exquisite. This is appropriate because the aesthetic concept that the book considers is not just beautiful, but elusive and difficult to define. SNOW IN A ...

Until she was 30, Ellen Forney, an award-winning Seattle-based artist, took her slightly unusual personality for granted. Her obsession with exercise, her impulsive sexuality, her bouts of ecstasy: she considered these things, however uncomfortable, a major part of who she was. After all, aren’t ...

It is perhaps a little hard to remember now, but in 2010, there seemed to be a new global superpower. A superpower that acted in unorthodox ways, which was unaccountable and yet of the people, and that was above all nameless, faceless and, as ...