“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” — Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” Imagine, for a moment, a canon of Western literature without “The Metamorphosis.” Without Gregor Samsa’s bizarre plight as an insect, without the novels “The Castle”, “The Trial”, “Amerika”…without even the  Read More

The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is such a well-known piece of history, that the spiral of events into disaster seems familiar and thoroughly picked over. However, a new book “Good as Gold”, written by the granddaughter of the ship’s Second Officer brings new facts to the surface about the human errors and  Read More

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom” has already been scooped up by President Obama for his late-summer reading, lauded expansively by the New York Times, and projected to easily hit the best-seller list when it goes on sale tomorrow. Franzen himself has become the first author in a decade to grace the cover of Time magazine  Read More

Well, I braved boiling temperatures, chugged endless water bottles and crowded into a near-bursting bookshop in a sweat-drenched t-shirt to see David Mitchell Sunday afternoon, the culmination of a literary pilgrimage that took me to a baking stretch of 10th Avenue in Manhattan. Mitchell, British novelist and author of “Cloud Atlas”, chose the independent bookstore  Read More

Also from The New Yorker: The Book Bench blog has chosen Tom Rachman’s “The Imperfectionists” as their July book club selection. I’m very excited by this — I’m currently 3/4 of the way through Rachman’s debut novel, which I’ve all but inhaled in the past few days. It’s one of those books that acts on  Read More