Critics At Large

I love books – both paper and electronic. Paper books and e-books provide different and unique experiences of reading, and I am often at ...

Turkish television's Magificant Century has reportedly over 200 million viewers worldwide. In our current age of interconnecti...

David Ben-Gurion (left) and Golda Meir as she shakes hands with Moshe Sharett (right) after signing Israel's Declaration of Inde...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is his first new novel since 2005. (Photo by Francesco Guidicini) Even so, sir, isn’t it a strange...

Very few book-lovers actually disdain the classics – your Victor Hugos, your Dostoyevskys, your Henry Jameses – but they can be difficult...

Isaac Bashevis Singer, in New York City in 1975. (Photo credit: Bruce Davidson ) Messiahs are seductive characters, for at least one v...

Author Uzma Aslam Khan at the 2014 Karachi Literature Festival. (Photo by Aliraza Khatri) I prefer novels that leave me wanting more. ...

Novelist Cara Black (Photo by Michael Allen Jones) From a doorway, Aimée saw the flic round the corner, then stop and question a wo...

Writer Sayed Kashua (Photo courtesy of Die Welt ) T he world of fiction is replete with novels about ‘identity’: sometimes i...

Author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Photo by Chris Higgins/NYTimes) When a person who is smitten by words is given a pen, he will not stop wr...

Anita Diamant's newest novel, The Boston Girl , was published by Scribner on December 7. (Photo: Dominick Reuter) Novels that ta...

Anthony Shadid (1968-2012) in Libya, March 2011. Photo by Fohlen Corentin. There are some people who, at least retroactively, define a...

My first entrée to the adult section of the public library where I grew up was Queen Elizabeth I. I don't remember how I first encounte...

German soldiers enjoy ice creams in occupied Paris in 1940 Words matter. Words teach, extoll, blame and praise. At their very best and...

A hoopoe in flight When I was about eight or nine years old, my father and I realized that our tradition of reading together had to ch...

Author Samar Yazbek (Photo: AFP / Joel Saget) There are novels about revolution, and there are revolutionary novels. Both kinds of n...

In the interest of full disclosure, a confession: I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice .  I loved it when I read it for the first ti...

One of the most fascinating dimensions of Canadian history, at least for those of us who did not grow up in Canada, is the history of Que...

Author and historian Margaret MacMillan (Photo by Brett Gundlock) We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Jessica L. Radin, to our gro...