Tag: Books and Literature

A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered.

Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx, listening as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.” A boy wearing blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some form of disconnection, even trauma,” Michael Almanzar, 19, said. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all […]

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Dan Wakefield, Multifaceted Writer on a Spiritual Journey, Dies at 91

Dan Wakefield, a protean and prolific journalist, novelist, screenwriter, critic and essayist who explored subjects as diverse as life in New York City in the 1950s, the American civil rights movement, the wounds that war inflicts on individuals and society, and, not least, his personal journey from religious faith to atheism and back again, died […]

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A Historic Visit to an Abortion Clinic, and What Could Happen to TikTok

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]

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Attempts to Ban Books Accelerated in 2023

After several years of rising book bans, censorship efforts continued to surge last year, reaching the highest levels ever recorded by the American Library Association. Last year, 4,240 individual titles were targeted for removal from libraries, up from 2,571 titles in 2022, according to a report released Thursday by the association. Those figures likely fail […]

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‘Modern Love Podcast’: Brittany Howard Sings Through the Pangs of New Love

Brittany Howard, the five-time Grammy Award-winning singer, makes vibrant, dynamic music about love. As the frontwoman of the band Alabama Shakes, she was celebrated for the power and emotionality of her voice. When she began her solo career in 2019 with “Jaime,” an album named after and dedicated to her older sister, who died at […]

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Andre Dubus III Built His Dream Home With a Boiler Room Office

The cedar-shingled house that Andre Dubus III built for his family in the seaside town of Newbury, Mass., has four levels that sprawl across 6,000 square feet, with plenty of rooms that could have made a nice writer’s office. But Mr. Dubus plies his trade down in the mechanical room, near the exercise equipment and […]

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Malachy McCourt, Actor, Memoirist and Gadabout, Dies at 92

Malachy McCourt, who fled a melancholic childhood in Ireland for America, where he applied his blarney and brogue to become something of a professional Irishman as a thespian, a barkeep and a best-selling memoirist, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 92. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Diana McCourt. In […]

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The Colombian Town That Gabriel García Márquez’s Legacy Helped Transform

Statues and murals bear his likeness. Schools and libraries are named after him. Hotels, barbershops, nightclubs and bike repair stores carry references to his work. In the sweltering Colombian mountain town of Aracataca, it is impossible to walk down a single street without seeing allusions to its most renowned former resident: the winner of the […]

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A Book Celebrates James Foley and Confronts a Man Involved in His Murder

Among the scattered notes taped to the door of the Irish author Colum McCann’s home office in Manhattan is a photograph of James Foley, the American journalist who was murdered by members of the Islamic State in August 2014. In the picture, he leans against a barricade of sandbags in jeans and a flak vest, […]

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Book Review: ‘Until August,’ by Gabriel García Márquez

UNTIL AUGUST, by Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Anne McLean. Billed as a “rediscovered” novel, “Until August” is likely to be the last published book of fiction by the Colombian master and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye from the author of “One Hundred Years of […]

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William Whitworth, Revered Writer and Editor, Is Dead at 87

William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died on Friday in Conway, Ark., […]

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‘Manifesting’ Is a Modern Version of a Centuries-Old Idea

Reality is what you make it — at least according to those who believe in manifesting, the art and quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence through the power of desire, attention and focus. Want to improve your health or make more money or get more Instagram followers? Believe hard enough, a host of TikTok […]

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A Bee’s-Eye View of the World

In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me (Chronicle, $40), Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford […]

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The School Issues We’re Battling Over Aren’t the Ones That Matter

A Florida school district, facing pressure about “nudity” in schools, removed from shelves a picture book that showed an illustration of a goblin’s bare bottom. Some students were saved from debauchery when school officials colored in a pair of pants on the goblin. That’s a particularly nutty example, from the newsletter “Popular Information” (the school […]

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Gabriel García Márquez Wanted to Destroy His Last Novel. It’s About to Be Published.

Toward the end of his life, when his memory was in pieces, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to finish a novel about the secret sex life of a married middle-age woman. He attempted at least five versions and tinkered with the text for years, slashing sentences, scribbling in the margins, changing adjectives, dictating notes to his […]

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‘Modern Love Podcast’: Novelist Celeste Ng on the Big Power of Little Things

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. [MUSIC PLAYING] speaker 1 Love now and — speaker 2 Did you fall in love [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] speaker 3 […]

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Adelle Waldman’s Journey From Brooklyn Literati to a Big Box Store

A good friend of mine, when talking about the New York dating landscape that led her to choose single motherhood, often refers to Adelle Waldman’s 2013 novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” An unromantic comedy, the book is a note-perfect depiction of Obama-era literary Brooklyn and the Ivy-educated cads who think of themselves as […]

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Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Rust Belt

For a long time during Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered what hidden disaster had befallen his family. His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped going to work, and the family moved into an empty factory storage room to save money on rent. But they […]

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He’s Probably in Your House, Lurking on Your Bookshelf

It appears on book covers by everyone from Jane Austen to William Faulkner to Martin Amis, but naming specific examples is a silly exercise. Walk into any bookshop and you’ll find that a good number of book covers feature Bodoni, a typeface created by Giambattista Bodoni in the late 18th century. Few other type families […]

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Restoring the Past Won’t Liberate Palestine

Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel. “You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated […]

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‘We’re Going to Stand Up’: Queer Literature is Booming in Africa

As a queer teenager growing up in northern Nigeria, Arinze Ifeakandu often found himself searching for books that reflected what he felt. He combed through the books at home and imagined closer bonds between the same-sex characters. He scoured the book stands in Kano, the city where he lived, hoping to find stories that focused […]

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If You Know How to Read It, Washington Is an Open Book

President Biden had a far better comeback at his disposal last week when he took offense at a special counsel report that suggested he didn’t remember which year his son Beau died. He’d already delivered that alternative response in “Promise Me, Dad,” the memoir he published in 2017 about his son’s illness and death. “This […]

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History, by and of Women

This week, I’ve been spending time in what I’ve come to think of as the Anne de Courcy extended universe. De Courcy, a British journalist and prolific author of popular history books, writes about the past through the stories of women of the era. Some of her books are biographies of famous figures, such as […]

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Ai Weiwei’s ‘Zodiac’ Is a Mystical Memory Tour

As the Year of the Dragon dawns, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has released “Zodiac,” a “graphic memoir” of scenes from his career — both real (hanging with Allen Ginsberg, the O.G. of Beat poets, in 1980s Greenwich Village) and imagined (debating Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader). Each chapter frames the artist’s take on traditional […]

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Read Your Way Through Lagos

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books. Lagos is an experience of a lifetime. The city will enchant and wreck you. The bedlam. The 15-minute journeys that stretch to five hours because of traffic jams. The multitudes everywhere you turn, each individual fizzing with hope and energy and […]

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Crafting an Aboriginal Reality Out of History, Myth, and the Spiritual Realm

Long before Alexis Wright was a towering figure in Australian letters, she took notes during community meetings in remote outback towns. Put to task by Aboriginal elders, her job was to take down their every word in longhand. The work was laborious, and it soothed her youthful fervor for the change that seemed all too […]

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‘My Heart Sank’: In Maine, a Challenge to a Book, and to a Town’s Self-Image

Rich Boulet, the director of the Blue Hill Public Library, was working in his office when a regular patron stopped by to ask how to donate a book to the library. “You just hand it over,” Mr. Boulet said. The book was “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” by the journalist Abigail Shrier. […]

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Fighting Book Bans, Librarians Rally to Their Own Defense

During 12 years as a youth librarian in northern Idaho, Denise Neujahr read to and befriended children of many backgrounds. Devout or atheist, gay or straight, all were welcome until a November evening in 2021, when about two dozen teens arriving at the Post Falls library for a meeting of the “Rainbow Squad” encountered a […]

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How Maurice Sendak Lived With His Own Wild Things

On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, sunbeams poured into Maurice Sendak’s studio in Ridgefield, Conn., crisscrossing one another with the precision and warmth of the children’s books that were born in this room. Sendak died almost 12 years ago, but his studio is exactly as he left it. There are his pencil cups and watercolor sets; […]

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