“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep,” says the garrulous shoemaker who narrates the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age” (1964), “it’s meant to ...

Some short stories build to a single sentence. This is so common, actually, that it sometimes seems most of the stories I read are of this type. Readers are herded toward the shiny black nailhead of a ...

The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence” may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of ...

Some books take their time to grab a hold of your attention, their plot and characters slowly developing into something interesting and beautiful. But other books catch your eye the second you skim ...