Critical Notes

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

A host of critics are enthusing about Say Her Name, a novel by Francisco Goldman that tests the boundaries between fiction and memoir. In the Washington Post, Roxana Robinson writes

As the publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel, The Pale King, was moved ahead of its original tax-day release, plenty of critical takes on the book (and Wallace)

The National Book Critics Circle awards received plenty of media attention. But one article, for better or for worse, attracted the most notice. The Los Angeles Times’ report was headlined

A century after his death, Mark Twain continues to get plenty of prime review coverage. Edmund Morris writes on the University of California Press’s publication of The Autobiography of Mark