Critical Notes

Scott McLemee investigates a harsh review of Robert Service’s 2009 biography of Leon Trotsky in the American Historical Review and discovers plenty of controversy surrounding the much-praised book. Lev Grossman

David Abrams reports from the Jackson Hole Writers Conference for New West. Carolyn Kellogg reviews singer-songwriter Josh Ritter’s debut novel, Bright’s Passage, for the Los Angeles Times. Eric Banks reports

Laura Miller, Balakian winner Ron Charles, and NBCC board member Rigoberto Gonzales share their summer reading recommendations (incluing Daniel Orozco's story collection Orientation) at NPR.org. A. Whitney Ellsworth, the first

The past week brought three major prizes to three women. Nan Graham, who’s worked with writers including Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, and others, has won the 2011 Maxwell

Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul famously ended their long-standing feud last week—and Naipaul famously squandered whatever goodwill he earned from it by declaring himself better than every woman writer, ever.

To commemorate a new Library of America collection of Kurt Vonnegut novels, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is spending this week paying tribute to the author. Ruth Franklin takes a look

We swear we didn’t have any inside knowledge: Just after we wrapped up our weeklong Celebrating Philip Roth series on Critical Mass, Roth was named the winner of the 2011

Following the overnight news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, Michiko Kakutani assembles a list of essential reading on bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the

Last week, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, a little more than a month after the book received the NBCC’s award in