Rohan Maitzen

The museum curator Margaret Abrams is deep into preparations for an exhibition on Christian Dior’s legendary 1947 “New Look” collection when mysterious packages start arriving. First a scarf with a “sentimental pattern of hearts, flowers, hot‑air balloons and pairs of dogs,” then a brooch, then another scarf — this one tartan and accompanied by a menacing note: “What side are you on?” Margaret is…

Early in my first reading of Tammy Armstrong’s Pearly Everlasting, I found myself searching online for answers to questions like “Can bears be domesticated?” and “Do bears bond with humans?” I knew I was making a category error: Pearly Everlasting is a novel, after all. More than that, it is a novel imbued with a deep sense of…

David Bergen’s latest novel, Away from the Dead, begins with a small-scale personal story. In 1899, in the Ukrainian city of Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro), twenty-two-year-old Julius Lehn, a bookish professor, meets eighteen-year-old Katka Martens, a bright, politically engaged student. He is an atheistic Jew; she grew up in a Mennonite colony. He is…