Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” was met with bafflement and awe when it appeared in 1977. Reality has finally caught up to his masterpiece. Read more
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Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” was met with bafflement and awe when it appeared in 1977. Reality has finally caught up to his masterpiece. Read more
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Ho, ho, ho, hope you’ve brought an appetite for destruction, because we’ve got some choice cuts for you this holiday season. Read more
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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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Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year. Read more
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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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“Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.” Read more
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In his grouchy, funny memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more. Read more
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In “The Age of AI,” Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher explore how far artificial intelligence has come. Read more
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Some of today’s best-loved books — think “Catch-22,” “Tender Is the Night” and even “Anne of Green Gables” — had a rocky reception in our pages. Read more
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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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