Author interviews
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Book Review
BOOK OF AGES, by Jill Lepore. This luminous story of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister is stitched together from fragments and scraps, a life’s “remains”: literature and descendants.
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Interview
JESMYN WARD, author of “Men We Reaped.” “Part of what I’m trying to accomplish in the book is to shock people out of their complacency.”
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Feature
Page-Turner at The New Yorker, July 1 2014. Uncovering the story of Ted Peckham and his thriving male-escort service in 1930s New York.
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Feature
Poets & Writers, May/June 2014. With their new magazine, Scratch, Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin are busting through the last literary taboo: money.
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Book Review
THE STEADY RUNNING OF THE HOUR, by Justin Go. “The plot, with its combination of world war, doomed romance and exotic locations, seems designed to catch the attention of Hollywood producers in search of another “English Patient.”
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Interview
BARBARA EHRENREICH, author of “Living with a Wild God”. “It’s rare to come across a memoir, perhaps especially by a woman writer, that is so much more focused on a philosophical coming of age than with emotional or sexual discovery.”
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Book Review
THE SCARLET SISTERS, by Myra MacPherson. “MacPherson hammers home the point that, even in 2014, powerful men treat women’s bodies as political bargaining chips. These Victorian sisters’ blast of protest against a restrictive and hypocritical status quo remains something to celebrate.”
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Feature
THE GREAT WAR, By Joe Sacco. The panorama darkens as we move from behind-the-lines activity to the combat zone, from preparations to attack: a dark-grey wash marks nightfall, with small white patches picking out candlelit dugouts and distant explosions.
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Book Review
CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Churchwell. It is art that eases our frustrations with a plot in which the “careless” escape and the dreamers are cut down, and it is to art that we are left wanting, ceaselessly, to return.
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Feature
THE ART GENOME PROJECT. At first glance, Artsy.net looks like the minimalist homepage of a wealthy museum. But it’s what you can’t see—how the images are categorised and organised—that sets the site apart.
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Book Review
THE HEIR APPARENT, by Jane Ridley. It’s hard not to see parallels between Bertie’s fate and that of his great-great-grandson Prince Charles, now 65: to spend adult life searching for something to do while waiting for Mother to die.
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Review Essay
SPARTA, by Roxana Robinson. The unit fragments and the soldier finds himself alone, more deeply alone than he was before he enlisted, more alone than he has ever been.
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Feature
THE UNWINDING, by George Packer. If there is hope in these stories, it lies in the resilience of the ordinary characters Packer writes about with empathy, patience, and respect—in what he calls “the ability of people to survive in the middle of strong winds blowing.”
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Book Review
SHRAPNEL by William Wharton. Shrapnel wounds haphazardly—it can glance off the surface or lodge deep in the body. In William Wharton’s World War II memoir, it becomes a metaphor for the war’s psychic impact.
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Feature
ON MARJORIE HILLIS. “Live Alone and Like It” is a brisk and bracing self-help guide for women who, by choice or accident, find themselves “settling down to a solitary existence.”
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Interview
STEVEN WATTS, author of “Self-Help Messiah.” “Critics suggested that he was really promoting a program of “flattery” as a way to soft-soap others and make them susceptible to your will.”
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Interview
DAVID FINKEL, author of “Thank You For Your Service.” “They’re not them, they’re us: they went to war, they’re trying to feel better, and here they are.”
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Interview
ANN PATCHETT, author of “This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.” “Somehow, with an autobiographical piece of writing, it’s easier to blame the writer for the bad feelings we may have when we read.”
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Feature
BOOKERMANIA at the Morgan Library. The display is designed to celebrate the physical book, while at the same time showing off what everyone comes to the Booker to find: intellectual battles, backstabbing, and bitchery.
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Book Review
WOMAN REBEL, by Peter Bagge. In Bagge’s drawings, children are heavy and burdensome: ugly, outsized bundles that hamper women’s freedom of movement.
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Book Review
CONFRONTING THE CLASSICS, by Mary Beard. The essays are as much about what happens in the gap between antiquity and modernity as they are about the ancient works of art themselves.
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Interview
CARLA KAPLAN, author of “Miss Anne in Harlem.” “These were women who traveled with a broom behind them, erasing every step they took.”
JOANNA SCUTTS 