From NYRB, a review of books by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The Naked and the Conflicted: We denounce the Great Male Novelists of the last century for their sexism, but something has been lost now that innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. The secret of A Separate Peace: Turning 50, the classic still has something to tell us. In search of a good companion: Matthew Reisz weighs up the role of weighty tomes of literary reference in the digital age. A review of Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers by Harry Bruce. A review of Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry by John Wrighton. Matthew Price reviews Collected Stories by Raymond Carver and Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka. An interview with Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Arthur C Clarke and the end of upbeat futurology: Reading the great sage of SF's Profiles of the Future makes one miss the era when the future seemed full of fantastic possibility. A review of The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessey. An interview with Dave Eggers, the heartbreak kid. David Walsh writes in praise of George Eliot’s Adam Bede on its 150th anniversary (and part 2). The hysteric moment: Novelists have increasingly faced the challenge of trying to compete with a culture that is a step ahead of them. Only poems can translate poems: A review essay on the impossibility and necessity of translation. Toward a Theory of Surprise: In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise.
