If you're picking up a copy of Inquirer columnist Faye Flam's first book, The Score (subtitled "How the Quest for Sex Has Shaped the Modern Man") looking for a titillating chronicle of men's sex lives, look elsewhere. Likewise, if you're looking for groundbreaking scientific research explaining why, for instance, guys like porn, you've picked up the wrong book. Flam is a journalist, pure and simple, so she's neither trying to arouse nor to astound. What......

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” From the first sentence, Beckett’s youngest and funniest novel, Murphy, proves to be so quintessentially Beckett that, as a friend aptly analogized over coffee one day this week: “It’s as if that sentence were Beckett’s body diced, dipped in bourbon, cured and later left to brew in hot water until some old expert could declare it, a perfect cup of something Beckett.” ...