Arthur Miller: American Witness By John Lahr (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $26) Art imitates life, and that is certainly true in the case of the playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), whose personal and professional life defined and added verisimilitude to…
The original Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s bestselling 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts neues) hit America’s movie houses in April of 1930. Considering that the first talkie, The Jazz Singer — a semi-talkie, really, in…
Anyone who doubts detective fiction can be high literature will be persuaded otherwise by just the prologue of Andrew Klavan’s second Cameron Winter mystery, A Strange Habit of Mind. A terrified man, Adam, in his apartment sends a short text,…
Last Summer Boys: A Novel By Bill Rivers (Lake Union Publishing, 285 pages, $14.95) Last month, eminent yet overrated feminist author Joyce Carol Oates tweeted a link to a surprising New York Times op-ed criticizing the woke publishing world’s hostility to…
The Turning Point: 1851 — A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Knopf, 368 pages, $30) 1851 was not only a pivotal year in the professional and personal life of the legendary writer Charles Dickens,…
I Must Betray You By Ruta Sepetys Philomel Books, 336 pages, $19 Ruta Sepetys writes about a different kind of vampire. The young adult novelist’s new book, I Must Betray You, is set in Romania, an Eastern European country whose…
Winston Spencer Churchill wrote with warmth and humor about his early education — and its limits. Certain passages had a touch of the tremulous, given the discipline to which he was subjected by one or two nasty schoolmasters. Biographers have…
