Remainders of the Day is the third of Bythell’s sardonic bookseller diaries … The setup of each book is the same. Bythell charts a year in the life of his second-hand bookstore (the largest in Scotland), documenting in short, wry entries his dealings with customers, book-buying expeditions to stuffy country houses and small-town Scottish life. Read more
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“No One Left” is that rare thing: a satiric crime novel that doesn’t forsake story for style. It is tightly plotted and pleasingly twisty. Read more
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With this important memoir cum manifesto, the Nobel peace prize-winning journalist who took on Facebook and the murderous Duterte regime in the Philippines exposes the abuse of power. Read more
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Fifty “often overlooked and unloved” works of literature get their time in the sun as novelist and publisher Russell presents books that influenced him … Filled with quirky observations and personal asides, this is just right for book lovers. Read more
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The biggest, most intricately ambitious little story you’ll read this year. Read more
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Artist and author Shaun Tan creates semi-mechanical and animalesque beings that seem born of both the natural world and industrious humans. Whimsical, cerebral, socially aware, grotesque and cuddly, Tan’s artistic universe runs the emotional gamut. Read more
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This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. Read more
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The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project, an exercise in pleasure giving … But what drives Banville — and his relentless hunt for the ideal adjective and simile and cadence — is a desire to touch something elusive and not quite nameable while providing a parallel or overlapping commentary on that doomed but never pointless effort. Read more
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Written in a lush and immersive style and shot through with sparkling turns of phrase, this is catnip for bibliophiles and ancient history buffs. Read more
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A new book—the first-ever collection of Lee’s work—and a solo exhibition in New York make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. Read more
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