Tag: Books and Literature

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 “You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated […]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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The Young Black Conservative Who Grew Up With, and Rejects, D.E.I.

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery. To support the idea, Democrats had invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist […]

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Alice Munro’s Best Work: A Guide

Before I’d read Alice Munro — when my knowledge of her amounted to an oafish word cloud (“older woman,” “Canadian,” “short stories”) — I imagined that the experience of reading her books, if I ever bothered to, would be like listening to classical music on fancy headphones in a college library: civilized, subtle, probably sleep-inducing. […]

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David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71. Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and […]

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That Humanity-Is-Doomed Feeling Is Back, Right on Schedule

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside […]

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Good News for Rich Uncles and Orphaned Heiresses.

You may remember that I’ve been blitzing my way through murder mysteries this winter. As it turns out, one Agatha Christie mystery is fun, two are interesting, but once you get past three or four, they start to raise real questions about the economic incentives of the early 20th century. If Jane Austen made a […]

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Book Review: ‘The Lede,’ by Calvin Trillin

I began this review with eulogies because the best section in “The Lede” is a short one called, simply, “R.I.P.” It contains remembrances of some of Trillin’s favorite people, including Russell Baker, Molly Ivins, John Gregory Dunne, Morley Safer, Andrew Kopkind and Murray Kempton. About Baker, the former Times columnist, Trillin writes that he “preferred […]

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Nikki Haley’s Books: What to Know

If you plan to run for president, they say, write a book. Nikki Haley has written three. The first book, “Can’t Is Not an Option” (Sentinel, 2012), captures her upbringing in Bamberg, S.C., as one of four children in the only Indian American family in town. It also traces her ascent into politics, from a […]

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Overlooked No More: Beatrix Potter, Author of ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. With “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” Beatrix Potter created what would become one of the world’s best-known children’s book characters. The book, about a cheeky rabbit who steals vegetables from the garden […]

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What Drives Kaveh Akbar? The Responsibility of Survival

When Kaveh Akbar was drinking, he would regularly wake up to find new bruises or gashes on his body, or to find that he’d lost his glasses, his wallet or his car. When he opened his eyes, he might find himself in an alley instead of in his apartment. Once, he got out of bed […]

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A Clash of Civilizations Brought to Life

The Aug. 13, 2021 edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Álvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course. The 54-year-old Enrigue, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas […]

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Hisham Matar Discusses ‘My Friends’

Talk to any friends of the writer Hisham Matar, and he has many, and soon they’ll bring up one of his more notorious pastimes: Have you ever seen how he looks at art? Matar has a habit born from his early years living in London, a period of immense grief, of choosing a painting and […]

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Joseph Lelyveld, Former Top Editor of The New York Times, Dies at 86

The former Times columnist Russell Baker, in The New York Review of Books, wrote: “Among the Lelyvelds, confusion, misunderstanding, and too much silence at all levels were the makings of an obviously unhappy family, whose members, if asked, Lelyveld says, would have called themselves a happy family. His book is more like life than memoir.” […]

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What to Know About the Science of Reading

During an era of intense politicization of education, there has been rare bipartisan consensus on one issue: the need to overhaul how children learn to read. Over the past five years, more than 40 states have passed laws that aim to revamp literacy instruction. And on Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced a […]

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Mixtapes, T-Shirts and Even a Typeface Measure the Rise of Hip-Hop

For the last year, celebrations of hip-hop’s first five decades have attempted to capture the genre in full, but some early stars and scenes all but disappeared long before anyone came looking to fete them. Three excellent books published in recent months take up the task of cataloging hip-hop’s relics, the objects that embody its […]

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These Classic Characters Are Losing Copyright Protection. They May Never Be the Same.

Hey, 1928 called. It wants all of these back: Then there’s J.M. Barrie’s stage version of “Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” the D.H. Lawrence novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography,” Wanda Gág’s picture book, “Millions of Cats,” and many more. (For a full list, see here.) “I’m pretty […]

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Judge Blocks Iowa’s Ban on School Library Books That Depict Sex Acts

A federal judge in Iowa temporarily blocked on Friday the enforcement of a law backed by Republicans that banned books describing sex acts from public school libraries. In granting the preliminary injunction, Judge Stephen Locher said that the law “makes no attempt to target such books in any reasonable way.” “Instead, it requires the wholesale […]

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