“The Decay of Lying” was as much a critique of the realism of Victorian literature as it was an argument for the pleasure of artifice in art. For Vivian, the beauty of artifice was precisely what gave art its power. But what of the artist himself? What becomes of literary forgeries, imitations, and outright faked manuscripts when we consider Wilde’s notion of art’s beautiful lies?

            This is the question that Gregory Mackie takes up in his deeply researched and entertaining book …

            Greenwell’s prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator’s first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions.

IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was “very much a work in progress”: most of its roads were muddy mires, neighborhoods were far apart by horseback, and much of the city sat in a genuine swamp to which most Congressmen had to travel from far away. In Bosom Friends,  Balcerski conveys the roughness of the city in you-are-there detail …

PARIS, 7 A.M. is a quietly striking novel that imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s first trip to Europe in 1937.

WHEN we first encounter the title character of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s intergenerational family saga, Patsy, she’s standing in line outside the U.S. embassy in Jamaica, dreaming of America. The year is 1998.