Books

Chapters in a writer's life of reading.

South Africa-born novelist, poet, and playwright Zakes Mda evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of his early life growing up in a Soweto family of lawyers, facing deprivation and abuse while struggling to find his identity as the child of a man exiled...

Remembering and celebrating voices raised in protest.

Remembering and celebrating voices raised in protest.

Compacting two dense millennia into a comparatively short and eventful narrative, Simon Jenkins treats readers to the gem-like historical highlights of one of the most successful and idiosyncratic nations on the planet. Whether outlining the transition...

This dark satire by Paul Theroux, beloved chronicler of travel and trains, tells the story of a small-town bank caper carried out by a trio of oldsters looking to do something patriotic. (The bank is run by a man they think might be a Communist.) Set i...

This text -- which excoriates the book-reviewing establishment with healthy indignation -- originally appeared in an underground magazine in 1962, but receives its first book instantiation only now. Keenly dissecting the failure of mainstream critics t...

Reading from Athena to Zeus.

Three works on big questions from the novelist's bookshelf.

Michael Hastings' startling 2010 Rolling Stone essay "The Runaway General" painted a portrait of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, that shocked readers and resulted in McChrystal's ouster. In this revealing book, Hast...

All E.V.O.O. is not created equal. Tom Mueller takes readers deep into the murky, high-stakes world behind a kitchen counter staple, where soaring demand has led to a thriving black market that deals in fake, sometimes toxic, olive oil. Eye-opening and...

Once upon a time, humanity stood naked and armed with only a stick against a world raging with vicious predators. Paul A. Trout theorizes with elegant persuasiveness that this long night of falling prey was instrumental in the genesis of our folklore a...