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A Reading Life

At Last

The final volume in the author's celebrated Patrick Melrose cycle faces pain with wit and unflinching honesty.

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Library Without Walls

"We Revel in a Crowd of Any Kind": Dickens the Journalist

The great novelist, in love with the life of the streets.

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Reading Romance

The Peacock's Partner

Tales of love between plain Janes and their beautiful beaus.

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Drawn to Read

Quiet

A new book sheds fresh light on the much-maligned "introvert".

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Kind Reader

Getting a Grip

When life becomes frighteningly unrecognizable, is it better to cling to the familiar -- or let go?

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A Reading Life

The Orphan Master's Son

The story of a professional kidnapper's life takes on a surreal edge in the appropriately nightmarish world of North Korea.

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University Presses

Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

The tangible value of the book, in the eyes of a diverse collection of writers.

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Kind Reader

Where the Girls Are

In search of female friends.

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Crime and Punishment

The Face Thief

A con artist's double deception.

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University Presses

Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab

Behind the wheel in the Windy City.

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Rock & Roll &

The Dean's List: Christgau's Best of 2011

Robert Christgau's annual rundown of the year's best in pop music.

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Rock & Roll &

Dad-Rock Makes a Stand

Looking ahead sometimes means looking back.

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Reader's Diary

Tolstoy: A Russian Life

A new life of the writer focuses on Tolstoy's place in a changing Russian society.

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The Speculator

Blueprints of the Afterlife

An absurdist vision of America's future is a new monument of "slipstream" fiction.

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A Reading Life

A Good Man

Courage and slaughter, dreams and betrayals, in the shadow of Little Bighorn.

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February 9: Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944. Thirty years after her Pulitzer winner The Color Purple, Walker continues to publish in many genres. Her most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir-meditation…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.