Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Lesser has been reading crime fiction for decades — Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle but also French and Japanese thrillers ...

Lesser (Why I Read) doesn’t merely chronicle the life of Louis Kahn, who came to America from Estonia with his impoverished family and gradually muscled his way into the pantheon of the 20th century’s ...

In this elegantly meandering narrative, critic and editor Lesser (Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen String Quartets), founder of the Threepenny Review, takes us through her ...

Michael Dirda has done it. So has Francine Prose. And Alberto Manguel, and Larry McMurtry, and David Shields, and Maureen Corrigan, and Anne Fadiman (over and over again). The Very Personal Book About ...

For writers, literature is a talent show: Those with the most talent win. Readers are more fortunate: Everybody wins. Quality reading exercises the crucial dialogue with yourself, the dialogue you ...

Reading Wendy Lesser can be like getting in touch with a fascinating, infuriating, brilliant but ultimately rather exhausting old friend from college. You know that you'll come away from the encounter ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Kate Tuttle Obsessions are by nature individual, and difficult at times to communicate to others.

Wendy Lesser's new book, "Scandinavian Noir," dissects and investigates a genre with which the author grew obsessed long before it became a global phenomenon. (Read the Times' profile here.) It all ...

Ever since Beethoven's time it has been a cliche to describe the string quartet - that intimate, deeply personal genre originally designed for no other listeners than the performers themselves - as a ...

I began Wendy Lesser's "Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books" with my usual yellow highlighter in hand, notepaper and pen at the ready, opening the reviewer's copy as I would for any normal ...

Many readers’ awareness of Scandinavian crime fiction began 15 years ago with Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium trilogy, the series that sent a tidal wave of Nordic noir across the North Atlantic ...

Wendy Lesser’s new book, “Scandinavian Noir,” dissects and investigates a genre with which the author grew obsessed long before it became a global phenomenon. (Read the Times’ profile here.) It all ...