Michael Alec Rose
Content by Michael Alec Rose
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The title of John Dufresne's fourth novel nicely sums up his distaste for writing any English phrase without at least a double meaning.
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The modern Churchman, in all his spiritual misery, has been a happy staple of British literature for generations.
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“Sometimes anger is the pure and determined light that shows you the way forward.” With these introductory words, author G.
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Nothing defines the history of the Jewish people so much as exile.
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In the world of letters, Nicholson Baker is our Shakespearean fool, our Old Testament prophet.
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Walter de la Mare’s fiction from between the World Wars has long been lost in a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity.
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Some novels weave their spell on the reader slowly, their incantatory prose administered drop-by-drop, page after leisurely page.
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For better or worse, the movie Amadeus has set our era's musical tone by building an unbreachable wall between genius and ordinary talent.
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A boy grows up to the age of eight in a central Pennsylvania town, never knowing anything beyond the world of family, church, school a human world, with purely human concerns.
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Issue:
Turn off the cell phone, shut down the computer and settle down in your comfiest chair.
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How did debut author Helene Wecker—who just published her superb fantasy novel The Golem and the Jinni—burst onto the literary scene with such an extraordinary achievement right off the bat? When we asked her that question, the answer only made us shake our heads in further wonder.
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The great bird artist John James Audubon was obsessed with the idea of drawing the living essence of his elusive subjects. The same thing could be said for author Katherine Govier.
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Leslie S. Klinger's great virtue as an editor is his sublimely willful and scrupulous disregard for the boundary between historical fact and literary falsehood.
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One day, T.S.
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As we grow older, the significant persons and signal moments of our lives become, strangely, not dimmer, but all the more vivid in our memories.
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John Harwood's second novel ought to be read aloud, through the reek of cigar smoke, port wine, yuletide logs and leather bindings.
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Every professor learns the hard way that scholarship does not prepare the scholar for classroom teaching.
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Art crime and its detection have naturally become hot topics in a red-hot art market, where the prices for Old Master paintings have soared through the auction-house roof.
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"Picks you up off the ground and puts you down goodness knows where." Thus reads the definition of wind in the glossary on the last page of Empire of the Ants.
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The pleasure of reading a good philosophical novel is a greedy one.
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<B>Erdrich's tale of an immigrant's quest</B> In beautiful early novels such as Love Medicine and Tracks, Louise Erdrich reckons with the Native-American strain in her own ancestry, int
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "Kubla Kahn," his most rapturous poem, in an opium - induced stupor: "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn/A stately pleasure dome decree." Coleridge was responding to the fantastic
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Yann Martel begins both this set of four early stories (collected here for the first time) and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, <I>Life of Pi</I>, with an "Author's Note."
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Fans of Woody Allen know by heart the figure of the American Jewish male who feels guilt (more or less) over abandoning his faith tradition.
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This is the ultimate book for classical music record geeks.
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In the history of socially conscious fiction, the shift from the realism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hard Times to the speculation of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 reflects
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Try to think of someone in our culture who enjoys unquestioned access to both the highest chambers of power and the lowest regions of squalor; someone who is trusted by all because he poses no threat
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Ever since Mark Twain made it clear that a prepubescent boy could make a mighty fine narrator, American fiction has enjoyed a spate of latter-day Huck Finns, each of them irresistibly precocious in
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It's a long, long while from October to June, especially in a Virginia summer resort town.
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Good songwriter that he is (under the alias John Wesley Harding), Wesley Stace knows the emotional value of repetition.
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There is a genre of fiction that might well be called “tourism horror.” In such stories, the protagonist travels to a breathtakingly attractive destination, where all hell breaks loose.
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Like every world-class ("universe-class"?) story set on a distant planet ages hence, the true marvel of Jim Grimsley's novel The Ordinary lies not in its technological wonders or its fully ima
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A powerful conception of electricity surges through David Bodanis' fascinating new book, Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity it is a hidden force as ancient as the cosmos
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Too much historical fiction relies on the tragedy of history’s grand sweep overwhelming little lives.
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Lord Berners the name can hardly be uttered without a sniff and a smirk. The author's full name says it all: Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baronet, 14th Baron Berners.
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The compilations of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror come annually as a great blessing to those of us who, from time to time, descend clandestinely out of the literature section of our premiere reta
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here are two heroines in Karen Joy Fowler's new novel Sister Noon. One is the city of San Francisco, the other a plain, unmarried society woman living there in the 1890s.
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Viennese beauty Alma Schindler was loved to distraction by all of the following men and bedded by all but one: ¥ Gustav Klimt, the most important painter of fin-de-siecle Europe ¥ Gustav Mahler, the
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A murdered corpse speaks from the bottom of a well, recounting to us the circumstances of its death, the life-work it has had to forfeit and its passionate hope of vengeance.
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With the new century, classical music is igniting more and more curiosity and wonderstruck devotion on the part of an ever-growing number of listeners.
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Oxymoronica is an addictive little book of paradoxical sayings presented by a lover of the English language who has amassed thousands of them. Dr.
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Believing in ghosts is a lot like believing in the characters of a well-wrought novel.
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If you’re making lists of classic science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, works by Ray Bradbury and Dan Simmons must appear on every one.
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It is easy to dislike every single character in Cynthia Ozick's new collection of stories, Dictation.
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What does it feel like to be seized body and soul by sudden fear or desire? To steal power, submit to power, relinquish power? To tumble for the first time with the love of your life?
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The last movement in our trio of new books approaches the genius of Mozart most closely.
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Starting at least as long ago as the Battle of Agincourt, the English have always thrived on hopeless situations.
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What kind of magic can make a nearly 800-page novel seem too short? Whatever it is, debut author Susanna Clarke is possessed by it, and her astonished readers will surely hope she never recovers.
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Susanna Clarke's magnificent 2004 debut novel, Jonathan Strange &andamp; Mr Norrell, marked the culmination of nearly a decade of authorial journeywork.
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Some years ago, John Crowley published Missolonghi 1824, a short story about the poet Lord Byron's last days in Greece, when he lay dying of fever, attended only by a servant boy.
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The “Octavo” is a set of eight cards that, when dealt by an expert, provides all the clues the subject will need in order to chart a successful path through life.
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Oracle Night is the title of a novel within a novel within a novel by Paul Auster (his 11th).
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In Karen Russell’s universe, by the time a story sets itself in motion the worst has already happened.
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Neither Tolkien nor C.S. Lewis could have devised a panorama of personages and events more fantastic than the one which befell the human race at the dawn of its recorded history.
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Issue:
“But my brother Esau is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” Expounding in nasal tones upon this Biblical verse and forever consigning it to comedy scripture, Alan Bennett began his ca
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In her latest novel, Cynthia Ozick confirms her position as our sorceress of disenchantment, our wizard of lost illusions, the closest we will ever come to the irretrievable magic of broken spells
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Viewers far and wide of Do You Speak American?, the television series airing this month on PBS, will be inspired to buy this companion volume in order to read it without any clothes on.
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Author Jane Glover is a conductor who specializes in Mozart, performing his works all over the globe.
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Karen Armstrong takes an active approach to Scripture I see Scripture more as an activity than a text, says Karen Armstrong, the foremost historian of religion in our time, whose new book The Bi
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In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion.
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The late Stanley Sadie, the most distinguished musicologist of his generation, completed the first of a projected two-volume biography of Mozart not long before he died.
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