In Nicole Krauss' new novel, two characters move to Israel in search of fresh starts. But this strained tale of midlife crisis takes some odd turns and never quite coheres.
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Messud's novel centers on best friends from different class backgrounds who begin to drift apart in 7th grade. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls The Burning Girl a story of "betrayal and isolation."
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Deborah Campbell's A Disappearance in Damascus is both a taut detective story and an intimate account of friendship during war — and that's before our reviewer discovered her own part in the story.
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Danielle Kurtzleben says Clinton's tale of her losing 2016 campaign reads like the unburdening of a woman relieved to finally, without interruption, tell her side of a tale everyone already knows.
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In Gorbachev: His Life and Times, biographer William Taubman makes a convincing case that the former Soviet leader's decency — the word appears throughout the book — is key to understanding him.
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The fabulously louche social scene of the mid-century French Riviera — where socialites and stars mixed with the likes of Winston Churchill — comes alive again in Mary S. Lovell's The Riviera Set.
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Michael Sims' anthology of Victorian science fiction explores the way Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein fit the nervous energy of the 19th century, and shaped the genre that came after it.
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Having watched many colleagues attacked for speaking up, gamer Latoya Peterson offers a deeply personal review "I applaud Quinn for ... accepting that she is messy, imperfect, and, well: Human."
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Once a year, for 51 years, residents of the Tuscan hamlet Monticchielo have staged a play about their lives. A new documentary finds the town's younger generation is losing interest in the practice.
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Sorry, Wrong Nombre: Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, known for stripped-down social realist dramas, bring their spare aesthetic to a surprisingly pulpy murder mystery.
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Sigrid Rausing is heir to a packaging fortune and a global philanthropist, but her new memoir describes a painfully ordinary family tragedy: her sister-in-law's drug addiction, struggle and death.
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Ben Loory's new story collection is dreamlike in the best way: both cheerfully surreal and cosmically unsettling, full of lovelorn cephalopods, discontented sloths and the occasional darker touch.
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This collection of essays, poems, and short stories — edited by John Freeman — makes for a gripping and intensely personal examination of inequality, transience and displacement in America.
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Brendan Mathew's The World of Tomorrow follows three Irish brothers having the best (or the worst) week of their lives, in 1939 New York. It's a serious literary novel, but full of madcap flourishes.
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Jesmyn Ward's lush and lonely new novel is set amid the mud, blood and heat of Mississippi. It's a road-trip odyssey complicated by hunger, sickness and the murderous racism that infects the town.
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Journalist Jason Schreier walks readers through the development of 10 recent games, finding marked similarities in the essential infrastructure of their design and production.
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As the weather turns cooler and we start to emerge from summer's torpor, it's time for some faster-paced romances with plenty of exciting twists and turns on the way to the happily-ever-after.
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Robin Sloan's latest is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book that takes a deep dive into the world of food, underground restaurants and markets, and the magic power of a good sourdough starter.
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Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that the death of a beautiful woman is "unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." In her new book, The Burning Girl, Claire Messud responds: Not to us women.
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Writer Santiago García and artist Javier Olivares examine Diego Velázquez' painting Las Meninas and its influence down the centuries with a heady — and sometimes heavy — mix of comics and high art.
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