Bohane may be a made-up place, or it may be based on an actual crossroads “out the tip-end o’” Ireland, but it’s already on the literary map of fine writing. With "City of Bohane", Kevin Barry makes landscape as much a presence... Read More

Topping the charts in 1762 was the hit Artaxerxes, sung all-in-English by Giusto Tenducci. With a three-octave range, Tenducci was a virtuoso. He also was a castrato. Apparently his loss was the Baroque era’s gain. The most brilliant... Read More

Technically, the author of the title piece didn’t sample the mud crabs pulled from the trench where she and Hamid Karzai were taking shelter from Russian tanks in 1989. That was when commanders sent her into Afghanistan with their... Read More

At the heart of David Szalay’s exquisite yet maddening novel "Spring" is a love story. What’s exquisite is the writing. What’s maddening is its inconclusiveness. The author was listed in 2010 as one of the twenty best British... Read More

If only Specialist Kate Brady had the benefit of the Army’s new “resilience” program, she might have been better equipped to handle combat stress more cheerfully and avoid all those hidden “thinking traps,” like jumping to... Read More

For every great writer there need to be equally great readers. Jonathan Yardley may be just that, willing not only to read a work once, but also to re-read it seven or eight times. Yardley has been a columnist and book critic for the... Read More

Literary Capital: A Washington Reader is a collection of narratives by residents of and visitors to Washington, DC. In other words, a real grab bag. Reach in and pull out goodies from Dickens, Emerson, and Melville, or put them back and... Read More

"Hotel Bosphorus" is light and flaky as Turkish baklava. It features a heroine who is “not the sort of woman to spend [her] time gazing at wrinkles and cellulite” when there is a crime to solve. A foreign film director has been... Read More