best book

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why. Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who...

FICTION DANGEROUS LAUGHTER Thirteen Stories By Steven Millhauser. Alfred A. Knopf, $24. In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo*kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are...