Rebirth of a Nation is ambitious in conception, sharp in tone, stylish in composition, erudite in argument, and unified by the force of conviction. It continues the project that Jackson Lears has been pursuing since his first book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), then in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003). These books purport to uncover the origins of our times, or, as the subtitle of the new volume puts it, “the making of modern America.” Rebirth’s epigraph, from

After the publication of his first collection of stories, Going Places, in 1969, Leonard Michaels was hailed as a brilliant new star in American letters. But for the remainder of his career he felt slighted by the sly whispers — and sometimes, the loud broadsheet cries — of East Coast literary cognoscenti, some of whom he suspected of applying personal antipathy, and many of whom marked him as a writer who had failed to rise to his potential.

Fans of filmmaker Michel Gondry may already be familiar with some of Gabrielle Bell’s work without knowing it. “Cecil and Jordan in New York,” the title story of Bell’s new collection, was recently adapted by Gondry into the short film Interior Design, one-third of the tripartite Tokyo! This deceptively simple fable contains the best aspects of Bell’s work: a sharp eye for human foibles, especially in relationships, and a dry, melancholic sense of humor. Jordan is an aspiring filmmaker, and his girlfriend Cecil accompanies him to New York, where her isolation and loneliness grow until she decides to transform herself

I was sent Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel Wit’s End (published in Great Britain under the title The Case of the Imaginary Detective) by someone from Penguin, who had noticed from my own website that I was interested in postmodern literature. She promised that this novel was about author ownership, and whether a character belongs to readers or authors — ontological questions which seem prominent in postmodern literary fiction. But the novel has left me wondering whether, in fifty years time looking back to the present, literary critics will remark that postmodernism ended when nobody noticed it any more, because

If you’re reading this review online, you’ve elected to do so instead of looking at baby pictures, porn, or any number of blogs, vlogs, and feeds—a seemingly limitless collection of media and information. It’s shocking what people will put online. Or, strike that, it’s no longer shocking. In a worryingly short amount of time, many of us have become very comfortable with oversharing our lives and consuming the personal details of others on the Internet. It is this rapid shift that concerns Canadian social critic Hal Niedzviecki in his book The Peep Diaries. Niedzviecki meditates on the changes wrought by

The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing – one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.

Edna O’Brien opens Byron in Love with a simple question: “Why another book on Byron?” The answer comes in the form of a remark by the poet’s friend Lady Blessington, who once referred to Byron as “the most extraordinary and terrifying person” she had ever met. Within a few chapters, the reader is convinced; O’Brien’s narrative is a compelling account of Byron’s Caligula-like cruelty, his gifts as a narrative poet, his amorous adventures in Europe (and with Cambridge choir boys), and his infamous eccentricities (he paraded around Trinity College with a pet bear and wanted to own Percy Bysshe Shelley’s

An air of comical amphetamine dependence pervades Martin Millar’s debut novel, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation. The protagonist, Alby, is a twenty-six-year-old paranoiac and small-time sulphate (i.e., speed) dealer convinced that both Chinese gangsters and the Milk Marketing Board have contracts out on his life. The book’s plot is chopped into raucous little sections that seem to reflect the characters’ short attention spans, while its sentences, in their haste to catalog the chaos, often forgo punctuation entirely. Indeed, one comes to feel thoroughly under the influence of Millar’s lively, hurtling prose.

Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What

Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy’s method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. “I was afraid I would break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word,” she says, and likens her mother’s emaciated body