Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, Duke UP, 2011. “The death of the author” has long been a theme in literary theory. First posed by the French intellectual...
Cherie Priest's Ganymede (Tor, 2011), the latest entry in the Clockwork Century series, is a delicious cross-country steampunk adventure spanning from the bayous of Louisiana to an underground...
Jamrach's Menagerie, by Carol Birch, Doubleday 2011. Jaffy Brown has lived all of his short life among the streets and sewers of London. Everything changes one day when he encounters a tiger in the...
With riots and revolutions—wrought, some have argued, by the inequities of capitalism—dominating the headlines, Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right enters into the fray at the right time. In...
Frank Schaeffer, son of the late Francis Schaeffer was raised to follow in his father’s footsteps as a luminary of the Christian Right in the United States. He spent his early years in the rarefied...
The Politics of Down Syndrome (Kieron Smith, Zer0, 2011) is an attempt at a primer on some of the social, ethical, and political issues that surround Down syndrome. With chapters on prenatal...
Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail, 2011) is one of the more outstanding entries on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. A lyrical, complex, layered narrative of friendship, betrayal,...
It sounds like the stuff of nightmarish urban legends: in rural India, men desperate for money or a meal are promised both, then held captive in “blood farms” where their blood is siphoned...
It would be fair to say that neither I nor anyone else expected the sheer volume of the reaction to last week’s piece on Hermione Granger. It was a silly idea, one I submitted to my editor almost...
It’s the end of an era. The entertainment which has stretched across books, movies, and countless marketing tie-ins, which has captivated children and adults for well over a decade and which has,...
