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The Artist Who Remembered Everything

This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941-94) to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler. Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard’s experimental memoir, “I Remember.” I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know. Read more

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What’s Weird? These Novels — Brilliant Forays Into the Otherworldly

Having no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, I nonetheless love stories of the weird and inexplicable. Give me a plot involving magic, deals with the devil, three wishes, an impossible-seeming murder, time travel, alchemy, the Tarot, accursed books, revenants, demons or Elder Gods, and I’m a happy reader. In what follows, I race — with necessary but unseemly speed — through 10 recent volumes of the “weird,” nearly all from small independent presses. Read more

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‘The Haunting of Alma Fielding’ Is a Ghost Story — and a Tale of Power and Fear

Summerscale’s writing is so inviting, the historical details folded into the narrative so well, that The Haunting of Alma Fielding reads like a novel you don’t want to put down. (The book design is also superb, the typeface somehow evoking something old and mysterious while also being easy on the eyes.) Best of all, it offers a variety of possibilities without definitively landing on one single answer; the book recognizes that, sometimes, the answer to the question “Was it real or was it fake?” is simply “Yes.” Read more

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