Archive for January, 2011

Memory, recrimination, hope in Böll’s Billiards

Sam Sacks admires Heinrich Böll’s “daringly and hypnotically written” novel about a renowned architect who sees his very success as a kind of complicity with the Nazis. If that’s not enticement enough, Jessa wrote the introduction to the reissue.

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Remarkable delineations of the quotidian

“Again and again progress is offset by brutality and the threat of much worse.” Suzanne Berne praises my friend Robb Forman Dew’s Being Polite to Hitler in the Times. Read it back-to-back with Dew favorite Christina Stead.

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