Randy Boyagoda

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 81 pages, $19.99 All told, Mary utters only two hundred words in the Bible. We hear from her three times in Luke, at the Annunciation and the Visitation, and when she remonstrates with the twelve-year-old Jesus after he has gone missing in the . . . . Continue Reading »

American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar Little, Brown, 368 pages, $24.99 Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish has been hailed as the first “Great Muslim-American Novel,” but that’s not saying much. Prominent post-9/11 books like John Updike’s Terrorist , Amy Waldman’s The Submission . . . . Continue Reading »

September 2004: Richard John Neuhaus was feeling tired and a little glum. This he had not expected, as he observed in a meditative letter to his longtime friend Robert Louis Wilken: “I am not at all, or not usually, dissatisfied with my life and work. I more or less happily do what I do: pray, . . . . Continue Reading »

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party ? by Geoffrey Kabaservice ? Oxford University Press, ?502 pages, $29.95 This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the . . . . Continue Reading »

1Q84 by haruki murakami, translated by jay rubin and philip gabrielknopf, 944 pages, $30.50 Much to my surprise, given the author’s reputation, I began to care about the main characters of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s new epic, 1Q84. They are a young man and a young woman who, after . . . . Continue Reading »

The Pale King by David foster Wallace Little, Brown, 548 pages, $27.99 It’s not often that suicidal postmodern novelists and conservative public-policy intellectuals share each other’s concerns about the troubling conditions of contemporary American life. This seemed to be the case in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Instructions by Adam Levin McSweeney’s, 1030 pages, $29 Using the kind of comprehensive, pick-a-fight judgments that characterized American literary criticism in a bolder, fiercer era, Leslie Fiedler once called the nation’s classic literature “a literature of horror for . . . . Continue Reading »

A knight who battles windmills; a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning a bug; a freed slave who decides to own slaves: One mark of great literature is its power to confront our imaginations with unexpected, idiosyncratic premises and, through the act of storytelling, make it possible for us . . . . Continue Reading »

Good news came from across the Atlantic late last year. England’s most prestigious literary award”the Booker Prize”had been awarded to a work that made the following assertion on its inside cover: “This is a novel of such rare and wondrous storytelling that it may, as one . . . . Continue Reading »

Joseph Conrad prefaced one of his novels by announcing that the task of a writer is, “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see !” Here is Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz : “Imagination puts us in the . . . . Continue Reading »