The New York Review of Books

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America's great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicalssuch asPartisan Review,The New Yorker, andThe New York Review...

The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described ';conceivers' who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet...

L.J. Daviss 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Daviss novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a...

When Bruce Duffy'sThe World As I Found Itwas first published more than twenty years ago, critics and readers were bowled over by its daring reimagining of the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell,G. E.Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A brilliant group portrait with the vertiginous displacements of twentieth-century...

The Outward Room is a book about a young woman's journey from madness to self-discovery. It created a sensation when it was first published in 1937, and has lost none of its immediacy or its power to move the reader. Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother's death in a car accident, Harriet Demuth is committed to a mental hospital,...

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany's greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted...