Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:06:33 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Books :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/books istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-empire-of-blood-how-the-nazis-ruled-europe/85051/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the summer of 1942, Albert Speer visited Adolf Hitler at the Führer's field headquarters in the Ukraine. "One quiet evening," Mark Mazower writes in "Hitler's Empire" (Penguin Press, 726 pages, $39.95), Hitler dilated to Speer on his favorite subject: what the world would look like after the German victory, which he still believed was inevitable. By the end of the year, he predicted, the Wehrmacht would have taken the Soviet Caucasus. "If in the course of the next year we manage to cover... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-magic-mountain-adalbert-stifters-rock-crystal/84867/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Last year, Stanford University Press published a selection of Hannah Arendt's essays on the arts under the title "Reflections on Literature and Culture." One of the pieces in the volume was Arendt's review of a 1945 translation of the novella "Rock Crystal," by the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. To Arendt, Stifter (1805-68) was "one of the very few great novelists in German literature," whose work stood out for its "pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty." Above all, Arendt stressed... CALEB CRAIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/english-the-omnivorous-tongue-henry-hitchingss/85131/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST "I CAN HAZ AMERICA?" went the caption on a photo of a wide-eyed Sarah Palin that circulated on the Internet soon after John McCain chose the Alaska governor to be his running mate. A few years ago, the caption would have been incomprehensible. But today almost any Web logger in America could tell you that the reference is to lolcats, the ironically cutesy, "laugh-out-loud" photos of cats on top of which deliberately misspelled captions are superimposed. Traditionally the cat in such photos asks... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/canceled-muhammad-novel-finds-new-publisher/85123/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A historical novel about the prophet Muhammad and his child bride that was pulled by Random House over concerns it would anger Muslims will be printed by another German publisher, the author said in an interview released Wednesday. Germany's Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper said Sherry Jones told them her debut novel, "The Jewel of Medina," will be published in October in English. The American author declined to identify the publisher or give other details, but dismissed concerns it could... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/publisher-agrees-to-print-the-jewel-of-medina/85116/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 11:26:32 EST BERLIN — A historical novel about the prophet Muhammad and his child bride that was pulled by Random House over concerns it would anger Muslims will be printed by another German publisher, the author said in an interview released today. Germany's Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper said Sherry Jones told them her debut novel "The Jewel of Medina" will be published in October in English. The American author declined to identify the publisher or give other details, but dismissed concerns it could... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/housekeeping-marilynne-robinsons-home/85047/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Marilynne Robinson is an anomaly in the great tradition of American literature. One of our few novelists at peace with religion, she isn't interested in the post-Puritanical game of unmasking hypocrisy, of entering into darkness. Unlike Hawthorne's New England, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Cormac McCarthy's Texas border country, Ms. Robinson's Gilead comes luminously to life without the aid of chiaroscuro. There is much sadness, but little shadow... ROBERT WINDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-fantasic-mr-dahl-jennet-conants-the-irregulars/85048/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Early on in Ian Fleming's first novel, "Casino Royale," an aspiring secret agent called James Bond puts a bullet into a Japanese clerk during a raid on Rockefeller Center. Like many such thrilling incidents in fiction, it is an implausible moment with roots in an authentic event. Fleming was ex-Naval Intelligence, and in 1941 was part of a team that really did break into the Japanese consular offices at Rockefeller Center, to steal (without shooting anyone) some cipher books and coding manuals... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-voice-of-fiction-james-campbells-syncopations/85049/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The best interviews are not simply dialogues; they're theater in miniature. The stage may be little more than a living room or an anonymous hotel suite and the props may be limited to a tape recorder on a coffee table, but there is a sense of dramatic occasion in the air. The interviewer must be well prepared, of course, and yet, that dogged preparation serves best when a carefully considered question elicits some seemingly unguarded response and a small discovery takes shape. As in the... OTTO PENZLER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-crime-scene-crime-writing-for-children/85050/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One way or another, one day or another, everybody reads mysteries and likes them, and of what other genre may this be said? Yes, the staff of the New York Review of Books will leap to their collective feet, claiming they are above that sort of thing, that they wouldn't soil their pince-nez by reading a mystery. Oh, please. They've read "Crime and Punishment," "Bleak House," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Les Misérables," "Native Son" — all outstanding crime novels — and, if they'll come clean, they... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-jacob-riis-lived-tom-buk-swientys-the-other/84669/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST If you stand at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry streets in lower Manhattan and look south, you will be greeted with a vibrant street scene you could find nowhere but in New York. The streets are lined with the thriving businesses of Chinatown — bakeries and fish markets, souvenir shops, a funeral home. To the west is Columbus Park, where on a recent weekend a large crowd of older people were listening to two competing performances of Chinese opera, while the young played soccer and basketball... SIMON BLACKBURN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-real-thing-richard-todds-meditation/84679/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST There is a genre more popular in America than in Europe: It is the essay as fireside chat, agreeable, intelligent, and wryly confessional. The author and reader nod along companionably. Not much information is imparted, but familiar things are enjoyed together. The philosophy is perhaps a little homespun, but that is all right as well. There are no extremes, nothing to guffaw at, and no sermonizing, but small pleasures of mutual recognition. There is — dare one say it — just a touch of... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-way-we-gentrify-now-derek-hyras-new-urban/84680/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Three years ago, visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared that "the great city of New Orleans will rise again." This was not a new promise, however, but an old refrain. In 1960, President Kennedy went to West Virginia and said "we must encourage — through a program of federal loans and assistance, on a sound economic basis — the long-term industrial development which is the key to West Virginia's future." For decades, Republicans and Democrats with presidential... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-forger-as-huckster-two-books-on-han-van/84664/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The forger isn't just a swindler. He turns values upside down. He doesn't merely change good coin for bad; he's an alchemist in reverse, offering base metal for gold. This is why, in Dante's "Inferno," the poet puts forgers and counterfeiters together with alchemists near the lowest circle of hell. There, Dante and Virgil meet the forger Master Adam, a bloated and legless torso wracked with thirst; this false Adam is himself a counterfeit, a mocking copy of the father of mankind. In the Middle... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/after-apology-rushdie-agrees-to-drop-libel-suit/84660/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses," received an apology to settle a British libel lawsuit over a book written by a policeman who drove a car for him after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini threatened Mr. Rushdie's life. Lawyers for the former policeman, Ron Evans, apologized to Mr. Rushdie today at a hearing in London and said the book, "On Her Majesty's Service," contained 11 "false statements." The publisher, John Blake Publishing, offered to destroy 4,000 copies and rewrote the book to... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/beyond-politics-the-stories-of-doris-lessing/84665/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Doris Lessing appears to be a writer who came, saw, and conquered, dramatizing a few points of sexual and racial correctness before such points were commonplace. Born in 1919 in Persia, and raised in colonial Rhodesia, she arrived in London as a young woman carrying the manuscript for "The Grass Is Singing" (1950), a novel about sexual tension between a racist white woman and a black African man. I first read her in college, not in a literature class but in a course on African history. The 2007... OTTO PENZLER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-crime-scene-anton-chekhovs-crime-fiction/84671/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST It has been correctly noted that the detective story could flourish only in a democratic society. Fictional works can only reflect what is known of real life, and in order for the police to do their job, there must be cooperation from citizens who prefer a condition of law and justice. If there is no reasonable justice system in real life, it is too great a leap of imagination to hope that writers could provide it as a form of literary entertainment. Standing up for the truth required almost... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-bookish-girl-meets-party-boy-curtis/84486/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST At the game of imagining strangers' lives, Curtis Sittenfeld excels. It's easy to envision her seated on a park bench or in a café, people-watching and making up stories to fit the faces in the crowd. Key questions in the game when the strangers are a couple: Why is she with him? Why is he with her? As a nation of voyeurs for whom the salaciously personal frequently eclipses the political, we ask ourselves those same questions about the people we elect to office — most frequently after a sex... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/biden-book-once-forgotten-now-a-best-seller/84475/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST A memoir by Senator Biden, once as forgotten as his presidential run, is now a best seller. A day after Senator Obama chose Mr. Biden as his running mate for the Democratic ticket, Mr. Biden's "Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics" was in the top 10 on Barnes & Noble.com and in the top 40 on Amazon.com. It was so in demand that on Sunday it was listed as out of stock by both booksellers. The Random House Publishing Group released the memoir in the summer of 2007, several months after Mr... RICHARD J. EVANS http://www.nysun.com/arts/under-siege-michael-jones-leningrad/84205/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST On June 22, 1941, the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler sent more than 3 million troops across the border with Soviet Russia in the largest land invasion in history. Their mission was to destroy the Soviet armies ranged against them, bring about the collapse of the Communist system, and establish a new racial and social order, in which 30 million Slavic civilians would be left to perish from hunger and disease, while German settlers moved in to set up shining new towns and cities linked by high-speed... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-man-and-his-gun-mr-gatlings-terrible-marvel/84207/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Richard Jordan Gatling (1818-1903), the inventor of the weapon that bears his name, had a passion for setting objects in orderly motion. His first invention was a four-bladed, screw-type ship's propeller, for which he just missed establishing a patent. That was in 1836, when he was still a teenager. Over his long career he would devise a mechanical seed planter, a steam-powered plow, and a new and better flush toilet. Of the dozens of patents he registered, 18 were for agricultural implements... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/adjusting-the-theory-of-just-war-gary-basss/84208/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST From the Vietnam War until the end of the Cold War, it was almost axiomatic that liberals would oppose every use of American military power. Defecting from that position was what qualified a former liberal as a neoconservative. But in the last 20 years, as the post-Holocaust promise "never again" was betrayed in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, parts of the left began to reconsider the virtues of force. In certain desperate crises, it now seemed, war might be the most humane response, the only way... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/title-of-woodwards-fourth-bush-book-unveiled/84189/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The suspense didn't quite compare to the identity of "Deep Throat," but we now know the name of Bob Woodward's fourth investigative work on the Bush administration, just three weeks before the book's release. "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008" will be published September 8 by Simon & Schuster with an announced first printing of 900,000 copies. Simon & Schuster is keeping the book under strict embargo — although such embargoes are often broken — and had even held back the... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/tales-from-londonistan-hanif-kureishis-something/84202/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Multicultural London has emerged as one of fiction's great subjects in the last 20 years, and Hanif Kureishi has led the way. Edgier than Zadie Smith, and more lively than Monica Ali, Mr. Kureishi has nonetheless not had a hit in recent years. "The Buddha of Suburbia" (1990), his first book, probably remains his most-read, and he is most famous for a still earlier achievement, his screenplay for "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985). Earlier this year, some English critics hailed his new novel... OTTO PENZLER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-crime-scene-george-pelecanos-the-turnaround/84203/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Mystery fiction has a history of being redefined. When Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins wrote novels in which crime, kidnapping, murder, and chicanery were significant plot elements, their works were simply regarded as novels, and they were reviewed that way. They weren't classified as "genre" fiction or "literary" fiction; they were just fiction, and could be enjoyed (and were) as such. Sometime later, the road forked. Detective stories were packaged differently from other novels, usually in... HAROLD HOLZER http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-lincoln-became-lincoln-lewis-lehrmans/84206/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The niche genre of books exploring Abraham Lincoln's individual speeches is nearly two decades old now, but remarkably robust, and still capable of fresh interpretations and eye-opening surprises. To call it a cottage industry for Lincoln historians would be an understatement, akin to calling Trump Tower a log cabin: This is one cottage that has built many mansions. More than any other writer, it is Garry Wills who deserves credit for popularizing the specialty for the current generation. His... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-self-inflicted-death-joan-wickershams/84039/ Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The before and the after are stark. Before, you don't think suicide has anything to do with you. After, you know it does — undeniably, irreversibly. The membrane separating those two states is whisper-thin. Whether you cross it is not at all up to you. Joan Wickersham entered the after on a February morning in 1991, when her 61-year-old father, Paul, got dressed, retrieved the newspaper from the end of the driveway, made his wife a pot of coffee, and brought a cup upstairs to her while she... JEREMY AXELROD http://www.nysun.com/arts/bold-english-anglo-saxon-poetry/83815/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Hwæt. That word, barking through the clatter of the mead hall, typically opened an Old English poem in the Dark Ages, and roughly translates to "What" or "Listen now." Old English is largely Germanic, its brusque sounds ungussied by the softer French words that would later mix into Middle English. It is the language of conquerors: The Roman Empire, finally crushed by the Vandals and Goths, withdrew from Britain in the fifth century, leaving the rural Britons to a vicious invasion by the Angles... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/court-publisher-owns-steinbeck-rights/83808/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST A federal appeals court has reversed a ruling that awarded John Steinbeck's son and granddaughter publishing rights to 10 of the author's early works, including "The Grapes of Wrath." The appeals court in Manhattan said a lower court judge made a mistake in calculating that the works belonged to the son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter, Blake Smyle. The appeals court ordered the lower court judge to rule in favor of the publishing house Penguin and the heirs of Elaine Steinbeck. Steinbeck's... RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-living-church-revisiting-vatican-ii/83726/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST It is commonly said, and with good reason, that the Second Vatican Council was the most important religious event of the 20th century. If media coverage is a measure, it was second only to the war in Vietnam during council sessions from 1962 to 1965. It is also said to have been the largest deliberative meeting in human history, with more than 2,000 participating bishops from around the world, along with hundreds of theological experts (periti) and ecumenical observers who did much more than... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/harvesting-the-waste-land-an-anthology-of-new/83727/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Looking back on the 1930s from the perspective of middle age, Robert Lowell described it as a time "when criticism looked like winning." The years of Lowell's apprenticeship were the golden age of the New Criticism, the intellectually rigorous, closely analytical style of reading that grew up alongside modernism in poetry. The New Critics — John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and their cohorts and disciples — were mostly poets themselves, and they came to maturity just... CHLOË SCHAMA http://www.nysun.com/arts/haruki-murakamis-what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk/83730/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST What makes a runner — who hits the pavement day after day, mile after mile — keep going? There is a myth that Tibetan monks run 300 miles in 30 hours by fixating on a distant object and repeating a mantra with each footfall. Last year's New York City Marathon winner, Paula Radcliffe, says that she makes it through a tough race by counting her steps. For the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who describes his decades-long dependency on long-distance running in his new memoir, "What I Talk About... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/anna-wingers-this-must-be-the-place-theophile/83731/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Berlin has been the European "It" city for most of two decades, but American authors have not been attracted in commensurate numbers. Jeffrey Eugenides lived there while writing "Middlesex," but who recently has written anything as memorably Berlin-centric as Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin"? Anna Winger's "This Must Be the Place" (Riverhead, 303 pages, $24.95) is therefore welcome. Ms. Winger, a Massachusetts native who now lives in Berlin with her family, gracefully captures the... OTTO PENZLER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-crime-scene-fun-in-the-sun/83732/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST My wife loves the summer (and desires a beach house with the focused single-mindedness of a cat watching a mouse hole) but believes that, once August arrives, it's pretty much over, because next month everybody goes back to school or work. Well, it not over — it's at its peak — and there is no better time to catch up on terrific books that are so much toe-curling fun that it's obvious why publishers released them to be read on long, cell phone-free flights, quiet afternoons on a porch, or days... DENIS DONOGHUE http://www.nysun.com/arts/flauberts-overcoat-james-woods-how-fiction-works/83728/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In his poem "The Novelist," W.H. Auden contrasts novelists with poets in terms of their different aptitudes. Poets can "dash forward like hussars," but novelists must "learn / How to be plain and awkward." A novelist, "to achieve his lightest wish," must "Become the whole of boredom, subject to / Vulgar complaints like love." Among the just, the novelist must be just, among the filthy, "filthy too." This poor slave, Auden implies, must take account of the rigmarole of ordinary life, the sundry... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/wisdom-like-a-flower-bed-sadis-gulistan/83729/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Common sense is probably the last thing we want or expect from poets. Give us confessions, prophecies, manifestos, but spare us the advice — especially advice in verse. The poet should be a firebrand, not some mumbling old uncle. And yet, it wasn't always thus. In older cultures, not only in Greece and Rome but in India, Persia, and China, the poet was often seen less as a visionary than as a dispenser of wisdom. This wasn't usually lofty wisdom; it was homespun, practical, and shrewd. It... CHRISTOPHER WILLCOX http://www.nysun.com/arts/whats-the-matter-with-thomas-frank/83646/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Although "The Wrecking Crew" (Metropolitan Books, 384 pages, $25) purports to be about conservatism, and its many "crimes," Thomas Frank's latest is actually far more instructive on the unsettled state of the Democratic Party and its current leftward drift. The author, who created a minor sensation with his best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?" is a trained historian with a pronounced affinity for the Frankfurt School and its neo-Marxist "critical theory" approach to culture and... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/young-single-in-beijing-twenty-fragments-of/83569/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST A young Chinese woman's voracious yearning for the West is what comes through most clearly in Xiaolu Guo's "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 167 pages, $21.95), a slender book that bears the hallmarks of so many first novels: tentativeness, clumsiness, transparent autobiography. It was Ms. Guo's first novel published in China, and unearthing it now — after her success with "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers," short-listed for the Orange Prize last... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/small-town-to-honor-solzhenitsyns-life-in-vermont/83564/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The southern Vermont town of Cavendish is planning a memorial service for the famed Russian writer and onetime resident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Prize-winning author had settled in Cavendish when he sought refuge in the West and was looking for a place whose forests and harsh winters reminded him of his homeland. He wound up spending 18 years in Cavendish before returning to Russia. The former exile, who had exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor camps, died August 3 and was buried... REIHAN SALAM http://www.nysun.com/arts/crash-course/83261/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Human beings are clever, bigheaded animals that have proved very formidable against predators like the now-extinct woolly mammoth and the near-extinct Bengal tiger. But we humans, particularly we modern humans, are also strangely vulnerable: fleshy, pudgy, and almost entirely bereft of natural defenses, such as thick outer shells, tusks, or sharp claws. Moreover, our gangly, awkward, injury-prone bodies are not particularly good at getting from place to place. Chimpanzees can at least swing... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/demons-inner-and-outer/83262/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, readers still display a surprising hunger for the definitive "9/11 novel." The acclaim that greeted Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" earlier this year was a sign of this appetite: Critics outbid one another to welcome a book that might make sense of the always receding, ever-present horror. Clearly, the more deeply committed one is to the moral possibilities of literature — the more one believes that, even in a mediatized age, the... SETH LIPSKY http://www.nysun.com/arts/hamdans-trumpet/83270/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For years I've had a theory about the portraits that hang in our courthouses — namely that in addition to the great judges and lawyers who are framed on canvas it would be fitting to include paintings of famed plaintiffs: Oliver Brown, who won his daughter the right to attend a school in Kansas that had been reserved for whites; Ernesto Miranda, who established the right to remain silent, and Clarence Earl Gideon, whose pauper's petition, filed from prison, won for all accused of a crime in... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-activist-and-the-recluse/83240/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that each new acquaintance was potentially "an ambassador of the infinite." For one of the Sage of Concord's most fervent admirers, the now-forgotten reformer and man of letters Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), the phrase proved surprisingly apt. On April 17, 1862, he received a mysterious unsigned letter in an almost illegible hand; into the envelope had been tucked four poems, along with yet another smaller, sealed envelope. Inside that he found a card on... OTTO PENZLER http://www.nysun.com/arts/criminal-cornucopia/83241/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Just in case you find the waning days of summer (it seems to grow dark an hour earlier than it did just a few weeks ago) to be a little depressing, here are some things to look forward to in the upcoming days, weeks, and months: "Zombie," a play based on the chilling novella by Joyce Carol Oates, makes its world premiere as part of the 12th annual New York International Fringe Festival. This hour-long adaptation by Bill Connington, who also stars, is the story of a sexual psychopath whose... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/minding-manners/83242/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Corruption is an old story, but globalization has given that story new forms. In Sana Krasikov's debut story collection, "One More Year" (Spiegel & Grau, 229 pages, $21.95), she describes the lives of New York Russians with one foot still in the Old World. In her stories, the precarious, sometimes gut-churning state of affairs in the former Soviet republic of Georgia makes life even more precarious for the illegal immigrants of Long Island and Westchester. In "The Repatriates," one of tightest... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-shape-of-things-to-come/83123/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Robert Kagan is an eminent and provocative strategic commentator and one of the chief authors of the successful Iraqi "surge" which has redeemed that conflict from the appalling fiasco it appeared to be only 18 months ago. In his recently published book, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" (Knopf, 128 pages, $19.95), he rightly debunks Francis Fukuyama and other millennial forecasters of the permanent and universal triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. But he goes too far in... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/calendar/a-window-view-of-parrots-and-peril/83127/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Quite a few things go out the window in "The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III" (Random House, 242 pages, $22), but you will find no spoiler here telling whether Bob T. Hash III is, as the novel's title suggests, one of them. This sly and discombobulating flight of whimsy by David Deans is, in a sense, a book-length joke, and nothing drains the humor from a good joke as effectively as vivisecting it. Detailing Mr. Deans's plot, too, is risky. He has set this persistently funny metafiction... MARISA KABAS http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-new-spot-for-travel-pages/83131/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST It may not be the perfect economic climate in which to open a new travel bookstore. But that didn't matter to the proprietor of the Idlewild Books, David Del Vecchio. "People said, 'Are you crazy opening a bookstore in this economy?'" he said. Even so, he forged ahead — in a location that seems to offer an even greater challenge. Housed in the second floor parlor room of a townhouse on West 19th Street, Idlewild is just blocks from the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. Yet despite the location... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/rowling-to-publish-new-tales-for-charity/82998/ Fri, 1 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST News alert for "Harry Potter" fans: A book of wizard fairy tales written and illustrated by J.K. Rowling is to be published for charity. A British charity said Thursday it hopes to raise $8 million through sales of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard." Ms. Rowling co-founded the Children's High Level Group charity, which supports institutionalized children. She has signed over her royalties. The book is a collection of five wizard tales referred to in Ms. Rowling's "Potter" saga. It was initially... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/is-geography-destiny/82887/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST A trip to India once meant a saffron-scented experience of the exotic. Today, going to Bangalore means a trip to a First World city built on modern technology. Business travelers can fly from Chicago to Shanghai and experience a pretty homogenous world of identically furnished high-rise offices and business hotels and frequent flyer clubs. And you can always get your preferred breakfast beverage: The sun never sets on the Starbucks mermaid. But the flat world experienced by the globe-trotting... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/tilting-at-spanish-history-a-manuscript-of-ashes/82838/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "Sepharad" was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" had a new European writer so powerfully seized the imagination of American readers. "Sepharad" was, in fact, a kind of transposition, into Spanish history and language, of Sebald's masterpiece — with its blending of fact and fiction, its obsession with the horrors of the 20th century, and its deeply ethical insistence on retrieving individual stories...