At last, in “Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell,” journalist, biographer and Kansas City resident Steve Paul has constructed a meticulous, intriguing, and long-overdue appraisal of a talent deserving of wider attention. Read more
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If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. Read more
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His first published book was a poetry collection, 1965’s “Plain Song”; his last book of poems during his lifetime, 2016’s “Dead Man’s Float,” was published about two months before he died. In between he published a dozen or so other collections, adding up to a massive and bounteous body of work that would have made Harrison a significant American writer even if he had never published in any other genre. Read more
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The Annotated Arabian Nights will be the first English translation by a woman, and will include female protagonists that have previously been omitted. Read more
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Replete with accounts of Polly’s many court battles, newspaper headlines, mobster dealings and society gossip, “Madam” is a breathless tale told through extraordinary research. Indeed, the galloping pace of Applegate’s book sometimes makes the reader want to pull out a white flag and wave in surrender — begging for her to slow down. Read more
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Court fines and fees have been a part of the American court system since the beginning. Civil rights icon Rosa Parks, for instance, was fined $10, plus an additional $4 in court costs, when she was cited for a municipal ordinance violation in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 for sitting on a bus reserved for whites. After the Great Recession, lawmakers increasingly turned to fines and fees to fund court services and other elements of government. “Over time, lawmakers started to use the courts as a piggy bank,” Foster said. “The results are truly staggering.” Read more
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Heartfelt, enduring images of war and the pain and damage it reaps are sprinkled throughout Kestrel’s vivid, richly detailed narrative, which carries McGrady to the end of WWII. This tale of love, courage, hardship, and devotion is unforgettable. Read more
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For more than 30 years, Britain’s Kim Newman has been producing thoroughly entertaining, startlingly original fiction. He has remained something of a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic, but that situation could — and should — change with the publication of his immersive new horror thriller, “Something More Than Night.” Read more
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“The Anomaly,” by Hervé Le Tellier, sold more than a million copies during an anomalous time. Now the genre-bending novel is translated into English. Read more
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The creditors whom Kevin Birmingham relied on to write “The Sinner and the Saint” — a dexterous biblio-biography about how “Crime and Punishment” came to be born — include a formidable array of scholars as well as Dostoevsky himself. Yet the biographer betrays no sign of panic. The tale he tells is rich, complex and convoluted, and though he must have struggled in constructing it, Birmingham writes with the poise and precision his subject sometimes lacked. (Though it worked out all right for him.) Read more
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