Critical Notes

Following the overnight news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, Michiko Kakutani assembles a list of essential reading on bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the

Last week, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, a little more than a month after the book received the NBCC’s award in

A host of critics are enthusing about Say Her Name, a novel by Francisco Goldman that tests the boundaries between fiction and memoir. In the Washington Post, Roxana Robinson writes

As the publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel, The Pale King, was moved ahead of its original tax-day release, plenty of critical takes on the book (and Wallace)

The National Book Critics Circle awards received plenty of media attention. But one article, for better or for worse, attracted the most notice. The Los Angeles Times’ report was headlined

A century after his death, Mark Twain continues to get plenty of prime review coverage. Edmund Morris writes on the University of California Press’s publication of The Autobiography of Mark

Matthew Tiffany reviews The Junior Officers’ Reading Club in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: It seems strange, given the omnipresence of technology and the Internet in our lives, that we have to

We’re playing catch up this week, just like you are on this first post-Labor-Day morning back at your desk.  — A trio of “Freedom” reviews to kick off summer’s end

Grace Talusan’s debut review in The Boston globe of Emily Fox Gordon’s “Book of Days: Personal Essays:” This new collection of her work over the intervening years is stunning, not