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‘James’ by Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s new novel amends Mark Twain’s classic tale [Huckleberry Finn] with the enslaved sidekick, Jim, at its center … What sets “James” above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being. Read more

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The Trump Indictments

Besides letting you pore over the indictment documents in printed form, the book offers some context from Murray and Weissmann. The professors include background on the cases, as well as comparisons to other cases abroad where criminal charges were brought against a former leader. Throughout the documents, the authors provide annotations and notes to help readers better understand. Plus, they even created a timeline and “cast of characters” section for easy referencing. Read more

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Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons

Worries about nuclear Armageddon, on the back burner for decades, seem to be reviving. In early November 2023, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was revoking its ratification of the 1996 global nuclear test ban treaty. In this astute assessment of the current situation regarding nuclear weapons, Scoles, a contributing writer at Popular Science and author of Making Contact and They Are Already Here, offers a must-read overview of America’s nuclear arsenal, emphasizing the technical details of keeping it up to date in the absence of testing, along with efforts at avoiding catastrophic surprises such as accidental explosions, unwanted actions by other nuclear powers, and simple theft of radioactive material for “trafficking or malicious use,” which has occurred more than 300 times during the past 30 years. Read more

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‘The Writer as Illusionist’ by William Maxwell

So far as I can see, there is no legitimate sleight of hand involved in practicing the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. They appear to have had their origin in religion, and they are fundamentally serious. In writing—in all writing but especially in narrative writing—you are continually being taken in. The reader, skeptical, experienced, with many demands on his time and many ways of enjoying his leisure, is asked to believe in people he knows don’t exist, to be present at scenes that never occurred, to be amused or moved or instructed just as he would be in real life, only the life exists in somebody else’s imagination. Read more

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‘Beautyland’ by Marie-Helene Bertino

A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty. Read more

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Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Historian Grafton offers a superb account of the astrologers, alchemists, and sorcerers who practiced “natural magic” in Europe from the Middle Ages through early modernity. Grafton demonstrates that, while magical practice was already ubiquitous, what was innovative about these self-styled Learned Magicians was their belief that sorcery worked because of, and not despite, the rational laws of nature. Subjects include the historical Doctor Faustus, a “necromancer” whose exploits would become fodder for Marlowe and Goethe; the Renaissance humanist and reviver of Neoplatonist philosophy Marsilio Ficino; and the occultist and soldier Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Read more

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Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

One might expect that an author who teaches philosophy at the University of London would be on the stuffy side, but Roache, host of the Academic Perfectionist podcast, is anything but dull. Her book is a lively examination of swearing in all its forms, and although it is often humorous, Roache also has serious points to make. Swearing is sometimes meant to be offensive, but much depends on the context. It can signal solidarity within a group or class, be used to emphasize a point and denote surprise, and have a cathartic quality that prevents disputes from escalating to violence. Read more

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‘The Privilege of the Happy Ending’ by Kij Johnson

Johnson plumbs great depths in her third short story collection, full of bittersweet tales of the fantastic. This pleasingly varied anthology of fantasy and homage collects 14 works, many of which were previously published elsewhere, including the Nebula and Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award–winning “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.” … While the entries are uniformly excellent in pacing and prose, the standouts may be the collection’s opener and closer. “Tool-Using Mimics” spins out a half-dozen explanations for a vintage photo of a young girl with tentacles that lead to piercing questions about how much we can know about the past, other species, and each other. The titular novella, which also won a World Fantasy Award, is a compelling fairy tale about a little orphan girl and her talking hen that poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage. Read more

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