The Masthead is closing out its first quarter! A quick look at the past three months:

Books reviewed: 11 (10 fiction and 1 play: Shakespeare’s Othello)
Translated fiction: 5 (from 3 languages: Russian, French and Arabic)
New-to-me authors: 4 (Doerr, Atwood, Camus and Chabon)
Oldest book: Shakespeare’s Othello (1603)
Newest book: Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014)
Longest book: Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (704 pages)
Shortest book: Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (87 pages)

A pithy recap of each book read and reviewed here since January 15:

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Detailed in its vision of mankind’s hypothetical innocence; experimental, psychological, emphatic; similar elements as in The Brother’s Karamazov and Demons

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Conventionally pretty, if also self-conscious and superficial; structurally cohesive with strong motifs but a little lacking in story and characters

Shame, Salman Rushdie
A serio-comedy in the same vein as Midnight’s Children (and almost equally as good); a vivid and terrifying account of how insidious and far-reaching shame can be

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Verging on the grotesque, a dystopia that engenders pity and anguish more than it provokes fear

The Stranger, Albert Camus
Argues for both the absurdity of life and its mundane value; existentialism without the crisis

Naguib Mahfouz: The Beggar, The Thief and the Dogs and Autumn Quail
The 1952 Revolution: what it was meant to be and what it turned out to be; literary works that give three different perspectives

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
Tight writing and a decades-spanning story of superhero proportions

Othello, William Shakespeare
A play pricked on by spite – and with a fifth act that takes an unusual turn for Shakespearean tragedy

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
A vagabond life ≠ Wanderlust and Holly’s glamour isn’t a happy glamour

Browse the review archive