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No man, ever, ought to carry a purse

by Christian Ocier - February 7, 2010 - 12:00am

According to Michael Chabon’s hilariously candid “William and I” essay, “the handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”

Changing one's mind about Zadie Smith

by Christian Ocier - January 10, 2010 - 12:00am

In “Crafty Feeling,” one of the versatile and thought-provoking essays contained in Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, the author confesses that whenever readers express admiration for White Teeth,...

Toying with life, death & redemption

by Christian Ocier - December 27, 2009 - 12:00am

Although Leo Tolstoy is primarily known for writing the juggernaut masterpieces Anna Karenina and War and Peace, readers venturing into the less formidable remainder of his canon will find within them the same incisive...

Toying with life, death & redemption

by Christian Ocier - December 20, 2009 - 12:00am

Forget it, Jin, it's Chinatown

by Christian Ocier - December 13, 2009 - 12:00am

Like many first-generation immigrants in America, the Chinese-born author Ha Jin is confronted with the inevitable dilemma of choosing between two cultural heritages — that of his Far Eastern homeland, and...

Think of Laura

by Christian Ocier - December 6, 2009 - 12:00am

Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian author celebrated for writing seminal English language masterpieces like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin, was a man whose art subtly underscored mysterious, metaphysical questions...

Is meat murder?

by Christian Ocier - November 29, 2009 - 12:00am

The consumption of flesh for food has always played a central role in a people’s culinary heritage. For our ancestors, it not only supplied them with much needed nourishment, but also served as a cultural repository...

Reconstructing Thomas Cromwell

by Christian Ocier - November 22, 2009 - 12:00am

The uncanny centerpiece of Hilary Mantel’s absorbing historical novel, Wolf Hall, is Sir Thomas Cromwell, a figure of ill repute who ascended the ranks of Tudor England by supposedly manipulating the papacy...

Intolerable obsession

by Christian Ocier - November 8, 2009 - 12:00am

Orhan Pamuk’s novels abound with a wealth of probing, social leitmotifs that are gracefully orchestrated into a Turkey perpetually wrestling with its hallowed traditions and a hollow modernization of Western...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's private inferno

by Christian Ocier - November 1, 2009 - 12:00am

When the great author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away in the summer of 2008, he left behind a bibliography of powerful masterpieces that rank him at the pinnacle of the Russian canon.

An alternate Manhattan

by Christian Ocier - October 25, 2009 - 12:00am

In The Book of Other People, the wildly imaginative anthology of short fiction edited by Zadie Smith, readers are introduced to Jonathan Lethem’s Perkus Tooth, a preening and eccentric culture savant who occasionally...

The world of Twisted River according to Irving

by Christian Ocier - October 18, 2009 - 12:00am

Dominic Baciagalupo, one of the three heroes central to John Irving’s tedious and blundering new novel, is a virtuoso Italian cook portrayed with “an air of aloofness about his conduct, or a noticeable...

A decade's worth of carnage

by Christian Ocier - October 11, 2009 - 12:00am

The year is 1964. On one overcast morning in Los Angeles, a Wells Fargo armored truck is robbed, its operators brutally murdered and scorched by a trio of masked marauders.

A melancholy score on musicians

by Christian Ocier - October 4, 2009 - 12:00am

Tibor, the hero of one of these lyrical, affectionate stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a young Hungarian cellist who lands in Venice one summer to participate in its Arts and Culture Festival.

Investigating literature

by Christian Ocier - September 27, 2009 - 12:00am

In July 1994, the Spanish literary critic Iñaki Echevarne was found one day at Barcelona’s Bar Giardinetto, gnomically reminiscing the life and death of an avant-garde poetic movement known as visceral...

In cold flood

by Christian Ocier - September 20, 2009 - 12:00am

At the heart of Margaret Atwood’s newest novel is a “waterless flood,” a manmade global pandemic that couldn’t be “obliterated with biotools and bleach.”

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