Simon & Schuster, 2011 Looking for talk of George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Muriel Rukeyser? Look no further than Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit. Well, I had to get your attention somehow, right? Because I know that by the time most of you get to the subtitle of
If you have a thing for epistolary tales, you probably already know and love this series; but, if you don't, you will want to. Start with the first volume, Griffin & Sabine, which introduces our hero and heroine via postcard. The postcards are one of the most beautiful aspects of
Adam Gopnik's third lecture considers the making of the modern Christmas, winter's holiday. He describes it as a "profoundly compound festival" and discusses its origins. It marries "not just many different pagan holidays but also the two chief kinds of festivals that exist in the world: the reversal festival and
"Baseball – what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around." Chad Harbach's debut novel shares its title with a guide to playing baseball, which includes meditative observations on the art of life itself. It's a
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
