Ursula K. Le Guin, "Toward Darkness," Literary Review, September, reviews A. S. Byatt's Ragnarök: The End of the Gods.

Eric Ormsby, "Why Vasco da Gama Went to India," NYT, 9 September, reviews Nigel Cliff's Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations.

Rachel Polonsky, "The paradoxes of Russian Orientalism," TLS, 8 September, reviews David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye's Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration and Vera Tolz's Russia's Own Orient: The politics of identity and Oriental Studies in the late imperial and Soviet periods.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, "Brooklyn by the Book," NYT, 9 September, reviews Evan Hughes's Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life.

Daniel Beer, "All Hearts Were Chilled," Literary Review, September, reviews Anna Reid's Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-44.