Critical Evaluation "Jeff Dolven treats no novels in Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation, but Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica stages a moment of just the sort that animates his study. An ex-model now suffering from hepatitis, Gaitskill’s narrator, Alison, coins the term 'style suit' to refer to the fashions of her moment. “I thought the new style suit was who I really was,” she remembers with a cringe. Not a costume to be donned or discarded at will, style, for Alison, is the outward manifestation of an inner self, as solid and unchangeable as we might wish our selves to be: 'I [...]

Critical Evaluation “After decades as a travel writer, Pico Iyer has fallen in love with being still. His new book, “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,’’ is a bustling paean to the stationary life. His reflections on the value of the meditative mind are quite global, leaping from the novels of Marcel Proust to the songs of Leonard Cohen, from a remote mountaintop in California to the back streets of Kyoto. More essay than book in length, the work’s brevity seems designed to accommodate the very busyness Iyer decries. But he embraces this irony: ‘It’s deliberately short, so you [...]