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An accomplished and very intriguing school story about deaf education, and the status of deaf culture. The 19th-century school story ended in graduation, the 20th-century school story ended in the dissolution of the school. This 21st-Century school story heads to unexpected places.

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A fascinating and very strange book about a man, of scholarly bent, whose world is a vast — perhaps endless — labyrinth of grand marble halls and vestibules, all lined with monumental statuary. He calls this The House, and he is the Beloved Child Of The House. It provides for him: the seas that flow through the lower halls provide fish and mussels and nutritious seaweed. Fresh rain can be collected from the misty upper halls. He knows of one other living person, whom he calls The Other and whom he meets by appointment, twice a week. He tells us ear...

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A witty and authentic recollection of startup life in 21st-Century Silicon Valley. Wiener had been working in the lower rungs of New York publishing when she seized an opportunity to join a startup. That didn’t work out, but there were plenty of startups. In the end, she spent much of her time at the “open-source startup”, but lots of her friends worked at “the social network everyone hated”; in the end, her open-source startup is bought by “the highly litigious Seattle-based conglomerate” and she returns to writing with a nice nest egg. There’s a lovely little passage the recounts how her Terms Of Se...

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Reimagining the Munich Agreement of 1938, seen here with as much sympathy for Neville Chamberlain as it is possible to muster and narrated from the perspectives of two minor diplomatic officials — one British, one German — who had known each other at Oxford. Critics were unusually skeptical of this Robert Harris foray, which confronts structural difficulties with an array of suspense-generating machinery, much of which doesn’t quite work. Harris has a point: if war was coming, it might have been better to delay it — though not, of course, better for the millions of Nazi victims who might have escaped...

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A spy thriller in a determinedly-realistic mode, without Le Carré’s gloom. It’s 1966 and it’s Argentina. The KGB is thought to be muddying the waters. A coup is brewing, and Vera Kelly is eavesdropping on government offices from the attic of a fancy bakery. In her spare time, she’s infiltrating a team of left-wing students who, it seems, are building a bomb. Winner of 2021 Edgar Award.

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A very fine account of the disastrous explosion of Chernobyl’s unit #4, which blew up during an ill-considered test. In the immediate aftermath, no one was sure what had happened, what was happening, or what to do about it. The effort to manage the disaster was a triumph of engineering under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

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This amiable, expert look at the world of science fiction as it was in the mid-1990s runs from the history and economics of the genre to the unique genre fandom that shapes expectation and reception. I was surprised to see the weight that Hartwell, a consummate insider, accords to the fan phenomenon, which has always defined itself as outsider and — very much unlike Hartwell — anti-literary. Yet the influence is undeniable, and Hartwell shows why that matters. The superb annotated bibliography is helpful.

What I miss here are the sensible discussions about trends and mechanics that Hartwell used to wri...