Reviews
NON-FICTION
Review by Christopher Hitchens
I have the distinct feeling that people do not buy Ann Coulter’s creed-screeds and speed-reads in order to enhance their knowledge of history or their command of syllogism. [more]
Review by Simon Jarvis
The Parallax View offers a show of organization. It has an introduction, parts, “interludes”, and so on. But no reader will seriously think that it would matter if the interludes were parts or the parts interludes. It could all come anywhere, because it is all shot from a Lacanian pistol. [more]
Review by Simon Kovar
Most of us can probably accept that Western states often fail to live up to their stated ideals – this much is a truism about state power – but does Chomsky live up to his own standard? [more]
Review by Hugh Lawson-Tancred
In reality, to read Berlin is to gain a fascinating insight into the relationship between the ideological environment of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and, by contrast, that of the early twenty-first. [more]
FICTION
Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster 
Review by Suresh Ariaratnam
It is not just Auster’s characters that migrate; technical recapitulation – such as the blurring of narrator and author, and the book within a book – occurs aplenty. This feels like seeing a magician doing variations on a card trick. Yes, it’s clever, but the more you see it, the less power it has over you. [subscribe]
Murder in Byzantium by Julia Kristeva
Review by Adi Drori-Avraham
When her father died unexpectedly in a Bulgarian hospital in which experiments were allegedly conducted on elderly patients, Julia Kristeva resolved to turn her hand to writing detective novels. That this notoriously baffling critic and psychoanalyst has been writing ‘whodunit’ narratives – Murder in Byzantium is her fourth novel to date – is something of a mystery in itself. [subscribe]
POETRY
Review by Stephen Hart
Gianuzzi and Smith’s fine bilingual Selected takes poems from all the periods, and provides a good sense of the variety of Vallejo’s work, ranging from the post-Romantic The Black Heralds, the vanguard Trilce, the political poems set in Paris and those inspired by the Spanish Civil War. [more]
Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow by Tobias Hill
Review by Kathryn Maris
Though powerful and well-crafted poems can be found throughout, the first half of Tobias Hill's fourth collection is stronger than the second. A highlight is a tour-de-force called ‘Repossession’, a long and dynamic narrative in blank verse that attends to the themes of domestic and urban life that form the basis of this collection. [subscribe]
Averno by Louise Glück
Review by Niccoló Milanese
In her tenth volume of poetry, the American poet Louise Glück re-imagines the portal, this time through the myth of Persephone and her mother Demeter. [subscribe]
