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‘City in Ruins’ by Don Winslow

Winslow concludes his Danny Ryan trilogy—and his career as a novelist—with an addictive finale that charts the Rhode Island mobster turned Las Vegas casino mogul’s turbulent business dealings and deadly feuds … Bolstered by careful plotting and meticulous attention to character, Winslow’s ambitious narrative culminates with an exhilarating climax that beautifully wraps up the series’ many plot threads. It’s a fitting swan song from a giant of crime fiction. Read more

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‘Ripley’ Series Debuts April 4 on Netflix

Ripley is an upcoming American psychological thriller television series based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf and Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, the eight-episode limited series was created, written and directed by Steven Zaillian. Watch trailer

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Simon & Schuster Turns 100

In January, S&S kicked off its centennial year with the release of The Simon & Schuster 100, a selection of 100 titles the company has published over its history—and as Karp suggests, what began with a windfall from four bestselling crossword puzzle books in 1924 quickly, and impressively, expanded. S&S’s first full list in 1924 would feature a biography of Joseph Pulitzer (a hero of Schuster’s), a poetry book, and Harvey Landrum—the only novel S&S published that year despite getting 241 submissions. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in the following years heavyweights such as Ernest Hemingway and Dale Carnegie joined the list, as did Margaret Mitchell for her epic Gone with the Wind.

In choosing a list of 100 books to showcase, Karp said the goal was to show “the cultural sweep” of S&S’s publishing program over the past 100 years. It was no small task for a program that has yielded 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 18 National Book Award winners, 18 Newbery winners, and 15 Caldecott winners. The original motto of S&S was to publish books that are “commercial, successful, and culture defining,” Karp noted. “That is still our mission today.” Read more

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Paul Yoon Wins 20th Annual Story Prize

The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. These characters reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures, moments that infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon… Read more

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Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe

This superb study by University of Cambridge particle physicist Cliff (How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch) examines contemporary physics’ most intriguing mysteries through profiles of the scientists trying to solve them … Cliff’s lucid explanations do a remarkable job of making the complicated physics accessible and even exciting, and the focus on the scientists’ stories ensconces the heady ideas in approachable, human narratives. This is a first-rate dispatch from the cutting edge of physics. Read more

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