Charm Offensive
Editor’s Choice: Womanizer, bribe-taker, statesman—the cynically brilliant Talleyrand inspired an equally colorful biographer.
Book Review
A Bright Shining Lie
It’s the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall. And it’s astonishingly bad.
Faster, Faster
Noël Coward’s dizzying life
The Courtier
Arthur Schlesinger’s journals are predictably sycophantic—and surprisingly good.
Toiling in the Dream Factory
Editor’s Choice: Moviemaking in Hollywood’s classical period was colossally complex, backbreakingly difficult, obscenely expensive—and it almost always failed.
The Great Assimilator
Saul Bellow’s genius lay in combining the high and the low, the reflective and the active, the ivory tower and the ghetto.
No Girlfriend of Mine
One woman’s estrangement from Hillary Rodham Clinton
Life in the Margins
Editor’s Choice: Finding the private lives of medieval men and women in the pages of their prayer books
Bowling Alone
The “greatest sports book ever written” is a mystery to Americans, for reasons all too revealing of national character.
Zuckerman Undone
In Philip Roth’s latest, the characters are treated with disregard—and the readers with something like contempt.