What is it about "The Great Gatsby"? The dark star of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unquiet masterpiece draws writers, critics and filmmakers into its force field, drives them a little mad, and hurls them back into the darkness. The book and its author add up ...

These are golden times for American satirists. After years of relentless brilliance, George Saunders finally seems to have crossed into the mainstream with his absurdist short-story collection “Tenth of December.” Now Sam Lipsyte seems to be making his move, backing up his smart and ...

Thirty years ago, Tim Parks moved from London to Italy. As a writer until recently mired in the midlist, he admitted that he didn’t want to watch “the rise of the Amises and McEwans” in more detail than strictly necessary. He has written 15 ...

A good read transcends into the eternal, melding the real now with a timeless present. Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being” is all that and more: a quietly amazing achievement, a careful construct bridging quantum physics and the role of the reader/observer, ...

‘Joyland” comes with all the horror trappings for which Stephen King is known: a sinister carnival, a grisly unsolved murder, a haunted ride. JOYLAND, by Stephen King. Titan, 2013, 283 pp., $12.95 (paperback) “Horror House was a dark ride, but when it was in ...

This cleverly titled book combines two subjects, for the “art” that it describes is not just the art of haiku composition but that of the pictures that frequently accompany the poems, often by the same person. “If haiku is a worldwide phenomenon, haiga (haiku ...

So why hasn't March 11, 2011, been the game-changer that many anticipated? Richard Samuels' masterful account of Japan's policy responses to its greatest crisis since World War II explains why continuity has trumped change. But maybe, just maybe, it hasn't, as he also reminds ...

When an American explorer named William Henry Furness III arrived on the remote Pacific island of Yap at the start of the last century, he found a scarcely touched place that made his previous destination of Borneo look almost developed. MONEY: The Unauthorised Biography, ...

When a crestfallen Andy Murray gave a choked-up television interview immediately after losing last year’s Wimbledon final to Roger Federer, few would have predicted that joy would quickly replace disappointment for the shy Scot from Dunblane. Four weeks later he was back defeating the ...

Endo Shusaku has helped Japanese Christians to assimilate their painful past and has weaned them away from narrow concerns with dogma or sexual guilt to project instead a broad and humane vision of the faith, sensitively attuned to the Japanese context. KIKU’S PRAYER, by ...