Robert Weibezahl

Content by Robert Weibezahl

A Balkan Scheherazade

Issue: October, 2008
Louis de Bernières is the go-to guy if you like richly told "big" books such as Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings—sweeping stories, filled with colorfu Read more »
A Balkan Scheherazade

Issue: October 2009
Louis de Bernières is the go-to guy if you like richly told "big" books such as Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings—sweeping stories, filled with colorfu Read more »
A book to savor and ponder

Issue: May, 2000
It is the summer of 1998, and while the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is smeared across the headlines, a more intriguing scandal is unfolding in a small New England college town. Read more »
A charming journey to the Emerald Isle

Issue: March, 2009
Ireland’s 20-year transformation from Europe’s poor stepchild to economic powerhouse has been well documented by both business and travel writers. Read more »
A house full of budding geniuses

Issue: February, 2005
Brooklyn in the '40s hardly conjures la vie de Boheme the way Paris in the '20s or Berlin in the '30s might, but for an eclectic group of writers, musicians and artists who came together an Read more »
A return to old-fashioned storytelling

Issue: July, 2002
The many collections of short stories that are arriving in time for summer reading are an indication that the genre is not just alive and well, it's thriving. Read more »
A tragic blend of sorcery and heartbreak

Issue: March 2011
Sheri Holman never writes the same book twice. Read more »
Chronicle of a life well told

Issue: November, 2003
It will come as no surprise to readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that the first book to leave a lasting impression on that sorcerer of fiction was The Thousand and One Nights. Read more »
Daniel Boone, unplugged

Issue: December, 2007
For many of us of a certain age, the enduring image of Daniel Boone is coonskin-capped actor Fess Parker on the eponymous television series from the 1960s. Read more »
Eugenides bridges the gender gap

Issue: September, 2002
There is a fine tradition of big, burly multi-generational sagas in American literature, but Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex, is probably the only one narrated by an omniscient herm Read more »
From County Clare to Swinging London

Issue:
The arresting photo on the jacket of Edna O’Brien’s lyrical memoir, Country Girl, captures the writer sometime in her heyday, cigarette poised between her lips, looking Read more »
Ghosts of the past haunt Berlin

Issue: July, 2002
Berlin was a cultural hot spot and the place to be for American and British expatriates in the 1930s. Read more »
Ha Jin on the immigrant life

Issue: December 2009
The characters who inhabit the stories in A Good Fall, a new collection by National Book Award-winner Ha Jin, are Chinese immigrants of various stripes, all living or working Read more »
Jack Maggs review

Issue: March, 1998
The year is 1837. The streets and back alleys of London teem with squalid poverty. Read more »
Kidder's revealing Vietnam memoir

Issue: September, 2005
There have been enough Vietnam memoirs, and memoirs thinly disguised as novels, to fill dozens of library shelves. Read more »
Lifestyles of the rich and shameless

Issue: January, 2002
If Dickens were writing in 21st century Los Angeles, he might produce something akin to Bruce Wagner's capacious new novel. Read more »
Love in the modern world

Issue: October 2011
When you only publish a book once every decade or so—and your last novel won the Pulitzer Prize, to boot—expectations for your next work are bound to be excessively high. Read more »
Love's promise and disappointments

Issue: April 2009
C.E. Morgan’s gossamer debut novel, All the Living, tells a simple story with a graceful, probing style that elevates it far above simplicity. Read more »
Pico Iyer's mystical journey

Issue: January, 2003
Pico Iyer's mystical journeyGiven that Pico Iyer is best known for his idiosyncratic travel writing, it comes as no surprise that the best sections of his new novel, Ab Read more »
Publishing's golden age through the eyes of an industry legend

Issue:
The name Richard Seaver may not be widely known outside of publishing, but this champion of cutting-edge literature, who died in 2009, was highly regarded as a purveyor of some of the most importan Read more »
Rabbit returns

Issue: November, 2000
Readers who have missed John Updike's chronically imperfect Harry Angstrom since his demise in Rabbit at Rest have cause to celebrate, because Rabbit is back. Well, sort of. Read more »
Reflections on the main men of fiction

Issue: November, 2000
One ardent Rabbit fan is novelist and critic Anne Roiphe, who offers her own idiosyncratic take on Updike's most famous character and six other male literary figures in For Rabbit, With Lo Read more »
Remembering an enigmatic genius

Issue: May, 2002
Alexander Gerschenkron may not be a household name, but this brilliant Harvard economist left an indelible mark on 20th century intellectual thought with a theory he called Economic Backwardness. Read more »
Review

Issue: September, 1999
Dashiell Hammett wrote fiction for only 12 years, but in addition to four novels he produced hundreds of short stories for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and mainstream periodicals like Collier' Read more »
Review

Issue: November, 1999
When I was a student in Ireland 20 years ago, many homes still did not have telephones, and central heating and reliable hot water were dicey commodities at best. Read more »
Review

Issue: January, 2000
The world of Colin Harrison's new novel, Afterburn, is a world of dark extremes. Unrelentingly corrupt, its characters oscillate between cynicism and melancholy. Read more »
Review

Issue: May, 2000
At 84, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow has produced a new novel as lively and engaging as any of his previous books. Read more »
Review

Issue: October, 2000
t is a brave writer who would all but invite readers to compare her first novel to those of a master. Read more »
Richard Russo : A Pulitzer winner covers new ground

Issue: July, 2002
It seems remarkable that Richard Russo, who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, has never before published a collection of short stories. Read more »
Rushdie's wildly inventive new novel

Issue: April, 1999
In his wildly inventive new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie offers up a modern tale set in the international firmament of pop music. Read more »
Saving a culture through books

Issue: October, 2004
When Aaron Lansky began studying Yiddish as a college freshman in the early '70s, it was hard to find books. Read more »
Secret sorrows of '60s classmates

Issue: November, 2002
It's been almost 20 years since Lawrence Kasdan's movie The Big Chill brought together a group of once-idealistic '60s types for a fun-filled weekend of mourning and recriminatio Read more »
The ghosts of memory

Issue: May, 1999
With a dazzling economy of words and precision of language, Pat Barker has constructed a quiet, elegant ghost story, in which the specter of the past literally and figuratively haunts a contemporar Read more »
The modern meaning of rage

Issue: September, 2001
In his last novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie gave us a modern rendering of the Orpheus story set in the jet-setting world of pop music. Read more »
The name that hid a startling secret

Issue: August, 2006
It was common in the 19th century for a woman to adopt a male nom de plume in order to be taken more seriously as a writer or to preserve her privacy. Read more »
The talented and timeless Edna O'Brien

Issue:
Now 80, the peerless Irish-born writer Edna O’Brien is still producing exquisite fiction, as evidenced in her new collection of stories, Saints and Sinners. Read more »
To London, with hope

Issue: June, 2009
One could call Rose Tremain's splendid new novel, The Road Home—which won Britain's prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in June—a novel of globalization, in so far as it tells a ti Read more »
Unraveling a wartime mystery

Issue: April, 2002
British writer Michael Frayn is best known to American audiences as a playwright (Copenhagen, Noises Off), but he has written nine novels, including the Booker Prize finalist Headlong. Read more »
When father is famous

Issue:
It is never easy to be the child of an accomplished parent, and Charles Dickens was one of the most famous men in the world. Read more »
Zafón’s latest literary game

Issue: July, 2009
Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón returns to the world of his international mega-seller, The Shadow of the Wind, with his latest novel, The Angel’s Game. Read more »

Columnist Information

Bio:

Calfornian Robert Weibezahl has been writing for BookPage for nearly 10 years. With Well Read, he highlights literary events, classics, important anniversaries and more. He's also the editor of two mystery anthologies and the author of the novel The Wicked and the Dead. Find out more on his website.

Sign up for our E-Newsletters!

Free Trial Subscription

Free Trial Offer for Public Libraries and Bookstores

Robert Weibezahl

Content by Robert Weibezahl

Sign up for our E-Newsletters!

Free Trial Subscription

Social Media

Print Edition

About

Advertise