Philip Glass: By the Book
The composer and author of “Words Without Music” says his favorite books about music “are not serious books about the philosophy of music or music awareness or whatever you want to call it.”
Saul Bellow, in 1964.
Martin Amis reviews a new collection of Saul Bellow’s nonfiction, including criticism, interviews and speeches.
The first volume of Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow ends in 1964, with the publication of “Herzog.”
The composer and author of “Words Without Music” says his favorite books about music “are not serious books about the philosophy of music or music awareness or whatever you want to call it.”
The story of two great physicists and their doomed competition to create a grand unified theory.
Jon Krakauer describes cases of acquaintance rape at the University of Montana.
Mary Costello’s debut novel is an intimate portrait of one Irish immigrant’s life.
Anna Freeman sets her novel in the world of female pugilists and their patrons in late-18th-century England.
A memoir of race, faith and a mother’s devotion, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith.
Bryan Burrough examines domestic terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s.
A Qing royal led resistance forces, often dressed as a man.
American design faced off with French fashion in a 1973 show.
An astronomer sees a glorious future for humankind in space — one that includes colonies on the moon and Mars in 2045.
An African-American family story is also a story of Detroit.
Fact and fiction merge in this tale of two extraordinary women.
In “Solitude Creek,” a killer likes to scare people into causing their own deaths.
Ms. Atkinson’s latest novel uses circular chronologies to tell a multigenerational family story.
Ms. Rendell, a Labour Party member of the House of Lords, was a prolific writer of intricately plotted mystery novels that combined psychological insight, social conscience and teeth-chattering terror.
Among those who have signed the letters: Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Bogosian and Michael Cunningham.
Mr. Gattis’s breakthrough novel is a gritty, nerve-racking tale of life in a gang-ravaged neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Authors explore the strangeness in everyday life, the mutability of time and memory, and the streets of London.
Mr. Leader brings an evenhanded approach to Bellow’s life in this biography, the first of two planned volumes, but the book takes time to find its feet.
Ms. von Furstenberg made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.
Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”
Ms. Pryor, who served more than two decades in the State Department, was the author of well-regarded biographies of the founder of the American Red Cross and the Confederate commander.
His time grown short, Dr. Sacks describes an existence of work, writing and shyness.
Timur Vermes’s debut novel has created a sensation in Germany, been translated into many languages and generated endless essays asking whether it’s acceptable to laugh about Hitler.
Bellow’s novel divided critics when it was first published in 1959. James Parker and Francine Prose discuss the experience of reading it today.
New books by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Amanda Eyre Ward, Andrew Roe and Margaret Vandenburg.
Chris Impey, the author of “Beyond: Our Future in Space,” says: “I grew up in a small, damp, cloudy country. The stars and space were not prominent in my childhood.”
Readers respond to a recent review of Kate Bolick’s “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own.”
This week, Sam Tanenhaus talks about Zachary Leader’s new biography of Saul Bellow; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Emily Bazelon discusses Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.
Toni Morrison, whose “God Help the Child” is No. 5 on the hardcover fiction list, used to receive phone calls from Marlon Brando, who would recite her work.
These picture books use storytelling to bring poetry to children.
May 1, 2015
April 30, 2015
April 29, 2015
A look at the first 50 years of the Police Department and of New York City’s landmarks law, and a fact-filled book about the Waldorf Astoria.
In her new cookbook, April Bloomfield is unabashedly fussy about each component, and that’s what makes her simple food so satisfying.
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