Category: Nonfiction

Frazier’s observations of New York are detailed and rich: the long essay on Canal Street (the candy-factory-turned-loft that Frazier lived in, the army-navy surplus store his landlord ran, the sounds of car horns and the colors of the sunset) is especially excellent, as are the essays about Queens and Brooklyn. Part of what I like…

In this pleasingly broad book, Nicolson delves into the geological, natural, and social history of the Shiant Isles, 600 acres of rock and sheep-grazing grass in the Outer Hebrides that Nicolson inherited from his father, who purchased them after his mother (Vita Sackville-West) noticed an ad for them in the newspaper. The Shiants are not…

I’ve been reading this book on the train and finding myself getting a little teary from the tenderness and sweetness and sadness of it, how Mark Doty articulates sorrow and hope and the joy a dog is/has/brings to people. As usual, Doty’s writing is detailed, vivid: he conjures such clear images of his beloved retrievers,…

Not as vivid as James’s fiction, but still enjoyable: pleasingly sinuous sentences, and impressions of light, of color, of landscape—ilex and cypress, canals and frescoes and dimly-lighted churches, the slower pace of travel in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

This book is, as the subtitle says, “A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings”—but, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap. Rorem writes about music in his diary, and bits of those thoughts about music (and the state of it in America today) end up in his speeches, letters-to-the-editor, and program notes for his own pieces.…

I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book,…

Each chapter in this memoir felt perfectly paced, and pleasingly varied: family history, personal history, untangling the past, details of daily life in Ireland and England: Earl Grey and lemon cake at tea, conversations in Dublin pubs with poets. What O’Faolain writes about men and women (about patriarchy, about the rise of feminism) is interesting…

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose is wonderfully precise: it seems like each word has been carefully chosen from a rich and expansive vocabulary, and the result is a collection of essays where the tone of each seems perfectly suited to its subject matter. There are shepherds and monks, mountain-top monasteries and bus rides in the middle…

This book, subtitled “Journeys in India,” is a series of clever and chatty vignettes about Indian culture and life on the Indian subcontinent. Dimock is at his best telling funny stories: the one about the monkey who gets into the house and amuses itself at Dimock’s wife’s dressing table; the one about the difficulties of…

After a discussion of translation and what a translator might or might not betray (the original words, the original language, the original author, the language being translated into, etc), Rabassa launches into his own career as a translator of books from the spanish and portuguese. His wit and word-play are pleasing, as are his discussions…