Culture Watch

Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale published by Vintage is an early non-fiction work by the noted Indian novelist (whose work The Glass Palace is a favorite of mine). Ghosh wrote In an Antique Land after living in 1980 as a graduate student in an Egyptian farming village. He excavates a little known aspect of Middle Eastern history in a book that moves back and forth from the 12th century to the 20th, detecting and describing the interactions, real and imagined, of an Indian slave and local Egyptian merchants, holy men, and sorcerers.Gardeners and lovers of mysteries will be pleased to learn that several of the books of British born (John) Beverley Nichols have been re-issued by Timber Press. In Down the Garden Path, I chortled at lines such as "I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl." I expect the same witty, high-spirited writing in Merry Hall. And if I wish my flowers served up with a bit of murder and sleuthing, Nichols' detective novel, *The Moonflower, praised by novelists Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen, also rests on my to-read pile.  more »

Those of us who became fans of Lorrie Moore’s when we first read her short stories in The New Yorker will welcome the publication of her new novel, the first in over a dozen years. Ms. Moore, who couples her career as novelist/short story writer extraordinaire with a professorship at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, may take her own sweet time between novels, but what she has produced is worth our wait. more »

In the 1960s a lot of people liked to talk about 'The Revolution' but very few actually lived it. A few thousand of those were in Lowndes County, Alabama, where the black population made a revolution, while the white population resisted. more »

The outstanding characteristic of Islandia is that it will leave no reader unmoved, or even untouched. To make your way through this tour de force of imagination will change you, according to what aspect of it touches you most closely. more »