Books
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‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction
How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
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Anne Lamott Has Written Classics. This Is Not One of Them.
Slim and precious, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love” doesn’t measure up to her best nonfiction.
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How Did Fan Culture Take Over? And Why Is It So Scary?
REBOOT, by Justin Taylor There are two kinds of novels about American life in the digital age: panoramas and selfies.…
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Long Before Trump, Immigrant Detention Was Arbitrary and Cruel
“In the Shadow of Liberty,” by the historian Ana Raquel Minian, chronicles America’s often brutal treatment of noncitizens, including locking…
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A Sugary Bonbon of a Novel From a Legendary Foodie
In “The Paris Novel,” Ruth Reichl is a glutton for wish fulfillment.
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A Quite Contrary Alphabet Book Asks, How Did Our Gardens Grow?
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World, by Jamaica Kincaid. Illustrated by Kara Walker.…
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That Time Europe Tried to Bring Monarchy Back to Mexico
HABSBURGS ON THE RIO GRANDE:The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire, by Raymond Jonas In October 1863, a…
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A Stunning Visual Celebration of Black Rodeo
In several frames of the artist Arthur Jafa’s seminal 2016 video collage of Black America, “Love Is the Message, the…
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Spooks, Sleuths and the Nazi Origins of the War on Drugs
In the years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland,…
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Lord Byron Was Hard to Pin Down. That’s What Made Him Great.
This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase…