Live-Wire Intimacy: On Goliarda Sapienza’s ‘Meeting in Positano’

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There’s something generous about Goliarda’s rule-breaking, what I would call freedom.
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Tangled Muses: On Chelsea Martin’s ‘Tell Me I’m an Artist’

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The novel telescopes us into Joey’s mind, revealing the depths and limits of her imagination.
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A Paragon of Nature Writing: On Doug Peacock’s ‘Was It Worth It?’

Peacock’s essays reveal how it’s always worth it to pay attention—and not just during high-profile adventures.

Perfectly Realized: On Tove Jansson’s ‘The Summer Book’ at 50

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Much is left unsaid—and this leaving out is the mainspring of the book’s power.
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A World of Fear: On Geraldine Brooks’s ‘Horse’

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'Horse' is a poignant check-in, a lookout point, for how far we’ve come, and how far we still yet must ride.
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Found in Translation: Mapping Budi Darma’s ‘People from Bloomington’

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These stories could be set anywhere. Yet they are distinctly and precisely here, in this southern Indiana town.
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The Shape of Thought: On Emily Hall’s ‘The Longcut’

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Hall manages to write a perambulatory novel that, like Zeno’s arrow, stays fixed in one place.
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Say You Were Gonna Make a Bomb: On Bud Smith’s ‘Teenager’

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If you can’t suspend your disbelief on page one, Teenager warns, you’re going to have a bad time.
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The Punctuation of Life: On Chloe Caldwell’s ‘The Red Zone’

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The project of the book—to make literary the body horror and psychological turmoil that are part of so many women’s lives—is an exciting one that, in the hands of a more inquisitive writer, could be culture-shifting.
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Don Winslow’s ‘City on Fire’: Good, Old-Fashioned American Pulp

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City on Fire is good, old-fashioned American pulp fiction—intelligent, well-written pulp, even—but pulp nonetheless.
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The Maybe-Messiah and His Grandmother’s Ghost: On Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of Jacob’

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That Tokarczuk's Nobel nomination was rumored to be greatly based on the accomplishments of this book has only magnified the anticipation. And now, it is here.
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Lucy Corin Picks Up Where Virginia Woolf Left Off

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The episodes of The Swank Hotel are weird because the world is weird. And the world is even weirder when the person you love most on earth might be dead but you still have to go to work.
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The Lost Art of Not Knowing Something

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I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude.
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Birding While the World Burns: On Charles Hood’s ‘A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat’

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It’s a book that celebrates the delights of amateurism, the facts that you stumble upon when you’re reading for something else, or the rare bird you happen to notice when you’re out on a whale watch.
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Novelizing Turkish Feminism: On Suat Derviş’s ‘In the Shadow of the Yalı’

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Derviş was a prolific novelist, writing since the age of 16, setting her fictions in the manner of social realism, a genre that, when she wrote, was surpassed by interwar postmodernism.
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Grace and Oblivion in the Forgotten Neighborhoods of ‘Shaky Town’

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Shaky Town is a tough and beautiful mural of a novel constructed with interwoven short stories that explore the streets of East Los Angeles in the 1980s.
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Over, Under, Sideways, Down: On Louis Menand’s ‘The Free World’

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The Free World is unflinching in chronicling the Cold War era’s “deeply entrenched ideology of gender difference” that manifested itself in vicious, often violent misogyny.
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Nature Isn’t Always Nice: On Megan Kaminski’s ‘Gentlewomen’

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Kaminski’s poetic speakers take aim at patriarchal and humanistic hubris, the aggregating centuries during which men have bent both heaven and earth to their methods.
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