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6 Degrees of A Wrinkle in Time

By Jess Sauer

No book is a perfectly self-contained artifact. Books are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it’s not. It’s the very nature of literature — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic works and five other books we’ve deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others… more »

Songs & Songwriters

By Sam Adams

Someone (no one can quite agree who) once said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture, but there's a whole shelf of books ready to prove them wrong. It may require some serious linguistic contortions to describe the sense of release that accompanies the resolution of a chord progression, or that strange change from major to minor, but the way it transforms our lives and our world is well within the grasp of… more »

Dirty Jokes In Shakespeare

By Pauline Kiernan

The works of Shakespeare contain more than 700 puns on sex and more than 400 on genitals. But, sadly, most of these have been kept under wraps for centuries, depriving the world of some of the sharpest, most sophisticated and hilarious jokes in the whole of literature. Shakespeare's sexual wordplay ranges from uproarious innuendoes to profoundly moving expressions of emotional pain. His kings, queens and aristocrats are as foul-mouthed as his clowns, and his women… more »

New Year, Same Old You

By Maris Kreizman , Audiobooks Editor

Here we are again, at the start of another year. It's easy to have a lot of good intentions in January, isn't it? You're really gonna fix yourself up this time around. You'll fit into the jeans you wore in college, floss daily, meditate, work harder but stress less, go green, learn a new language. But somehow, no sooner do you set these lofty goals then, well, inertia kicks in. You get overwhelmed by the… more »

Icon: Don DeLillo

By Scott Esposito

After the Twin Towers fell, plenty of novelists felt the need to respond, but there was only one man readers expected to hear from: Don DeLillo. His novels and stories had been delivering the news early for decades, and he’d long been covering terror and American society. After all, the Towers loom on the cover of his masterpiece, Underworld, and in the days after 9/11 his 1991 novel Mao II was widely cited as predicting… more »

New + Noteworthy

Editors’ Picks

eMusic Reviews View All

Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

2011 | Publisher: Dreamscape

“A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world’s answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals.”

This is one of those books, you know the type. Maybe you’ve seen the ones about bananas, or tomatoes, or tea? It’s one of those fascinating “food biographies” so bursting with facts and vignettes that you adopt more than a newfound respect for the subject — you start to think it’s the most important thing in the history of the world. Okay, beg your pardon, that’s a wild hyperbole, but Tom Mueller’s sensuous storytelling stimulates the romantic mind. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil makes the case that its slippery subject has been capturing imaginations and greasing the wheels… more »

Alex Ross, Listen to This

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Introducing his subjects’ human side without straining for it

It’s hard to sound as learned and erudite as Alex Ross without seeming like an elitist and a snob, but Ross is neither of those things. “The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world,” he writes in the introduction of  Listen to This, a compendium of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written primarily (but not only) about classical music since the mid ’90s.

That’s the balance of things here: Classical music is Ross’s root source, the music he immersed himself in until he turned 20 and experienced a punk rock epiphany in college radio, which he outlines entertainingly in that same… more »

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

As much a puzzle of a marriage as a portrait

As a specialist in domestic dramas (A Home at the End of the World, The Hours) Michael Cunningham has a way of elevating dinner table conversation to Italian opera. Set in New York’s SoHo sometime in the mid-aughts, By Nightfall is the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, an art dealer and magazine editor, respectively, who represent the staid yuppiedom we’re familiar with from Mia Farrow-era Woody Allen movies. Cunningham’s outsized references to Fellini and Thomas Mann help stir the Creuset, making for a page-turner that’s hard as hard to resist as a 2 a.m. Thai food delivery or a designer sample sale.

As the Harrises evaluate their long marriage, the already… more »

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Rewarding nostalgia for college grads of any era

In nearly two decades, Jeffrey Eugenides has given us three very different novels. It’s really only their shared focus — young adulthood — that indicates they’re written by the same author. Following his intoxicating but quiet first effort, The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides let loose a much more rabid imagination, darting across time and continents to chart the life of Middlesex‘s charming protagonist Cal Stephanides. The Marriage Plot splits the difference. More intimate than Middlesex and more down-to-earth than The Virgin Suicides, The Marriage Plot is about paralyzing campus love, about the need to define oneself and go bravely into the adult world when one’s chief interest may really be devotion to someone else. Set… more »