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Books and IdeasNovember 21, 2022
A Fragmentary History of California
Ashton Politanoff’s fascinating You’ll Like it Here, a hybrid book on the Golden State in the 20th century, looks at the novelistic details of everyday life.
Dustin Illingworth
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FictionApril 27, 2022
Antonio Di Benedetto and the Sound of Madness
His bleak and surreal 1964 novel The Silentiary examines one man’s quest for quiet.
Dustin Illingworth
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FictionJanuary 14, 2021
The Pleasures of Shirley Hazzard’s Intricate Fictions
Her stories offer the opulent doom of ancient tragedy wrapped in mid-century garb.
Dustin Illingworth
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Books and IdeasJuly 2, 2020
Jon Fosse’s Existential Doppelgängers
In the Norwegian author’s hypnotic novel The Other Name, two men come face to face with the limits of art and life.
Dustin Illingworth
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Books and IdeasApril 14, 2020
One of the 20th Century’s Great Novels of Dislocation
Lojze Kovačič’s Newcomers is a sprawling WWII-set bildungsroman filled with anger, wonder, loathing, and shame.
Dustin Illingworth
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Books and IdeasJanuary 8, 2020
The Letters Behind One of American Poetry’s Most Infamous Books
The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979, which collects the correspondence between Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, is an extraordinary philosophical inquiry into what is permissible in a work of art.
Dustin Illingworth
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Books and IdeasSeptember 19, 2019
Does This Nearly 1,000-Page-Long Sentence Encapsulate the Anxiety of American Life?
Lucy Ellmann’s novel Ducks, Newburyport provides a comprehensive diagnosis of one citizen’s very modern alienation.
Dustin Illingworth
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FictionJune 18, 2019
Ingeborg Bachmann’s Experimental Gem ‘Malina’ Is a Novel Like None Other
The Austrian writer’s 1971 book is one of the most potent renderings of female consciousness European literature has produced.
Dustin Illingworth
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FictionApril 8, 2019
What to Do When Art Leaves You Speechless
Optic Nerve, the debut novel from Argentine writer María Gainza, is an exquisite and intimate look into one person’s idiosyncratic vision of art history.
Dustin Illingworth