Biographies of presidents tend to emphasize their political and personal lives, rather than their professional careers. This book, which accompanies a traveling exhibit, a... Read More

This is a remarkable book, but not easy to encapsulate. Perhaps best described as a meditation ˆ partir de Proust, it is a parallel exploration of the fictional character of... Read More

Inhabiting the strange new country of the literary Indian, the poet speaks true without being melodramatic; his poems are pointed without being maudlin. These are important... Read More

The author grew up in the heart of Soviet Russian literary culture; her father was perhaps the most erudite and wide-ranging writer of his time. In 1938, when her husband was... Read More

The author characterizes Russia’s Silver Age as the period in the early twentieth century when the country’s culture and art evolved from critical realism to aestheticism,... Read More

“Only to a few, and they are very few, does an extraordinary life come; all the others must be satisfied with what they have.” Luisa, an aging accountant for a toy firm in... Read More

“To be alive is to pause with one foot lifted, / losing a step to gain a second.” The poems in this compact volume witness the poignant indecision and ambivalence that... Read More

The vibrant hardscapes of California’s streets, beaches, and sere, high deserts frame the austerely beautiful internal terrain of middle age, in this new collection by... Read More

A tattered copy of an old Argentine cowboy fable of dusty death gives this lively novel its borrowed title, but its code of male fighting honor has a vernacular homeboy sound.... Read More

In his last days, as in his extraordinarily fruitful life, Leo Tolstoy searched for truth. Fleeing his home in 1910 at the age of eighty-two, resentful of the turmoil he... Read More