The Memory Chalet

His body failing due to the ravages of a degenerative motor neuron disease, his prodigious mind still intact, Tony Judt, in the months before his death on August 6, revisited his past to furnish a memory palace whose rooms are among the most bracing and resonant imaginative chambers I've entered this year. This posthumous volume is a remarkable legacy.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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