Cathleen Schine

The Possibility of Humor

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

Ungovernable, Capricious Life

In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.

The Voyage Out

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.

‘Binding and Building’ America

Maxine Hong Kingston’s best work has a timeless quality, fresh, beautiful, horrifying, bursting with myth and fantasy and nagging reality.

Subjects of Considerable Gossip

Greta Garbo craved protection, and one such guardian was Salka Viertel, a nearly forgotten screenwriter who nurtured a community of fellow émigrés in postwar Hollywood.

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

It Had to Be Her

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both.

Heaven Can’t Wait

Giacomo Sartori’s outrageously charming novel ‘I Am God’

Bonfire of the Bathroom Vanities

Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Lake Success’

Comic Noir

Paul Goldberg’s ‘The Château’ is the perfect summer beach book for those of us too agonized by the world as it is to escape into a summer beach book.

So Funny You Could Plotz

Unruly and Unerring

Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’

The Wisdom of the Yard

No Love Without Delusion

Weiner!

A film about imperfection in all its human glory

‘Enthralling & Enraging’

A Girl, a Horse, a Trap

‘A Beautiful, Mournful Novel’

Atticus Lish’s ‘Preparation for the Next Life’

A Triumph of Love

In the Dark of the Museum

The Alaskan brown bear rises up as tall as a brownstone and claws the bright wintery diorama sky; the vultures and hyenas and jackals hunch and squirm hideously in the light of their glass case. But all around them is darkness. The rooms that hold the Museum of Natural History’s famous dioramas are vast and dimly lit.