When Sondheim, to my astonishment, wrote back, he said that although he no longer had a regular solving practice, he counted introducing American readers to cryptic crosswords among the great achievements of his life.
New in Paperback: âThinking Inside the Boxâ and âThe Mountains Singâ
By Jennifer Krauss
March 5, 2021
THINKING INSIDE THE BOX: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Canât Live Without Them,
by Adrienne Raphel. (Penguin, 304 pp., $18.) This affectionate analysis of a cultural fixation that in 1924 The Times dismissively compared to âthe temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong setsâ succeeds â our reviewer, Peter Sagal, argued â because âlike a good crosswordâ it challenges us to âback away from our assumptions,â âthink differentlyâ and âapply ourselves again.â
TYLL,
by Daniel Kehlmann. Translated by Ross Benjamin. (Vintage, 352 pp., $16.95.) Our reviewer, Irina Dumitrescu, called this picaresque fable in which the proverbial trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel tightrope-walks above the brutality of 17th-century Europeâs Thirty Yearsâ War â