His spare, icily precise books explore humanity’s most serious themes, including South Africa’s legacy of apartheid. And not all of them are downers. Read more
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Category: Authors
The Essential Ursula K. Le Guin
Her powerful imagination turned hypothetical elsewheres into vivid worlds governed by forces of nature, technology, gender, race and class a far cry from our own. By 1975, when she became the first author to have had multiple novels win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, she had changed science fiction forever. Read more
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The Master Fabulist of American Fiction
Millhauser reminds you of Borges sometimes, of Calvino and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. Millhauser has a Nicholson Baker-like gift for meticulous, closeup description of the ordinary, but his world is also one that may be inhabited by ghosts, a realm where paintings and postcards come to life, where people can vanish or fly on carpets, and where it’s possible for someone to cohabitate with a frog. Read more
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Where to Start With Haruki Murakami
Japan’s bestselling living novelist Haruki Murakami started writing aged 30 and became a literary sensation in 1987 when his fifth novel Norwegian Wood was published. His mixture of realistic and dreamlike narratives has earned him a dedicated fanbase, and his name is often floated as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature. Read more
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The Essential John le Carré
…le Carré wrote many good books, and a handful of great ones. A spy must learn to distinguish signal from noise. Here are his best works. Read more
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How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life, he’s taken American letters to uncharted realms. Read more
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30 Author Names You Might Be Mispronouncing
You’ve seen their names on the front of your favorite books, but how exactly do you say those names? Read more
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Umberto Eco: A Library of the World
The Italian journalist, critic, philosopher, professor of semiotics, medievalist, bibliophile, and best-selling novelist, Umberto Eco (1932-2016) takes us on a journey through his Milanese library of 50,000 volumes, and, more impressively, the library of his mind. Best known for his novel, The Name of the Rose, Eco is a vastly prolific, witty, and original thinker — and talker — who holds forth on topics as wildly diverse as the value of reading low-brow books, the origins of fascism, the psychology of conspiracy theorists, reading on paper versus digitally, the importance of discarding useless memories, truth versus lies, great fakes, and brilliant mistakes in history. “To be intellectually curious is to be alive. And believe me, a lot of people are not alive.” – Umberto Eco. Watch trailer
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Taking a Late-in-Life Victory Lap, Thanks to His Novel’s ‘Lunatic Energy’
Robert Plunket’s 1983 novel, “My Search for Warren Harding,” was out of print for decades — but remained stealthily influential. Its reissue has catapulted him out of retirement. Read more
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Elizabeth Gilbert Halts Release of New Book after Outcry Over its Russian Setting
Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, announced that she is halting the release of her next book following a “massive” backlash about its setting in Russia. Read more
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