A weekly appreciation for the art of the review.

“If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment.”

– Very well put, Charles Baxter of the New York Review of Books.  Very well put indeed.

Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself.

– Parul Sehgal at Bookforum on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  by Jeanette Winterson.

“[A]lthough its characters are probably Hollinghurst’s most sympathetic ever—which is to say, his most rounded and realistically rendered, if not necessarily his most likeable—The Stranger‘s Child is the author’s loneliest novel yet.”

– Naomi Fry at n+1 on Alan Hollinghurst’s “excellent novel” The Stranger‘s Child.

“Lawrence Weschler shrinks the world.”

Padma Viswanathan on Lawrence Weschler’s Uncanny Valley at The Rumpus.

If the newly published MetaMaus — an engaging 25th anniversary commemoration of the first volume’s publication — is any indication, Spiegelman has yet to recover from the trauma of his creation’s success.

– Lee Konstantinou on Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus

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