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Heather McElhatton isn't a morbidly obese concubine with a thing for primates. How's that for free will?
Tricia Cornell
Heather McElhatton
Pretty Little Mistakes
HarperCollins
Heather McElhatton has made a lot of mistakes. There's something universally appealing... More >>
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You mean Richard Gere didn't bring Buddhism to America?!
Rod Smith
Lawrence Sutin
All Is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West
Little, Brown
Nothing gets past Fluffy. The woman behind the... More >>
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Comic-strip artist Alison Bechdel draws a messy portrait of her secretive father and the house where he hid
Chris Barsanti
Alison Bechdel
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Houghton Mifflin
It would be nice to think that if we all kept careful records of our lives—an... More >>
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Finally, someone has the answer to the binds of modern parenting—a Honduran nanny
Beth Hawkins
Caitlin Flanagan
To Hell with All That
Little, Brown
A few weeks back, my older son busted me watching Supernanny. He came in during a scene... More >>
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Craig Morgan Teicher
Gary Shteyngart
Absurdistan
Random House
At 325 pounds, Misha Vainberg, the ironic, sad, and insatiably hungry protagonist of Gary Shteyngart's... More >>
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Chris Barsanti
Etgar Keret
The Nimrod Flip Out: Stories
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
There are things one doesn't expect to hear from a girlfriend after she says... More >>
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What can go wrong with 80 acres, 20 cows, a bull, and a pickup?
Philip Connors
Nicole Lea Helget
The Summer of Ordinary Ways
Borealis Books
Nicole Lea Helget grew up on a farm near Sleepy Eye, one of the great town... More >>
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Good Grief: Joan Didion tries to write about loss without losing it
G.R. Anderson Jr.
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Knopf
In June, Joan Didion committed apostasy in the pages of The New York Review of Books. It's a... More >>
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Novelist Rick Moody Feels His Pain. Yours? Not So Much.
Matthew Wilder
The Diviners
Rick Moody
Little, Brown
Step too close to The Diviners or make any sudden movements and the novel will erupt in a John Philip... More >>
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How W.S. Merwin found his own turf--and everyone else's
Lightsey Darst
W.S. Merwin
Summer Doorways
Shoemaker & Hoard
Poet W. S. Merwin takes the title of his latest memoir, Summer Doorways, literally:... More >>
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Bret Easton Ellis castigates and/or wallows in consumer Babylon
Matthew Wilder
Lunar Park
Brett Easton Ellis
Alfred A. Knopf
The pleasurable tension of a Bret Easton Ellis novel lies between what it seems to be (a... More >>
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Jesse Berrett
Mia Couto
The Last Flight of the Flamingo
Serpent's Tail
Norman Rush is a white man in Africa. J.M. Coetzee is too. Alexandra Fuller,... More >>
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Jesse Berrett
Kristoffer A. Garin
Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes, and Showdowns that Built America's Cruise-Ship... More >>
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The myths go modern in 'Songs on Bronze'
Lightsey Darst
Nigel Spivey
Songs on Bronze
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Not everyone will look at a sentence such as "'Twere long to tell all that... More >>
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What makes an author want to be his own leading man?
William Waltz
Salvador Plascencia
The People of Paper
McSweeney's
The most memorable--and quite possibly the cheesiest--scene in the 1998 Jim Carrey... More >>
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Kristin Thiel
Rana Dasgupta
Tokyo Cancelled
Black Cat
The next time you fly, remember to look around the cabin and locate the best storyteller.... More >>
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Matthew Wilder
Gilbert Sorrentino
Lunar Follies
Coffee House Press
Big props go out to Gilbert Sorrentino, author of the new literary object Lunar... More >>
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A new book asks what murder has to do with making babies
Quinton Skinner
It is no coincidence that many of the best stories require that somebody put an end to somebody else--if possible, with extreme malice. Murder,... More >>
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Don Paterson searches for the "Opposite of an Epiphany"
William Waltz
Don Paterson
Landing Light
Graywolf Press
With drop-dead delivery, Don Paterson wonders, "What do you call the opposite of epiphany?"... More >>
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A former 'Playboy' model exposes Hef's silicone paradise
Diablo Cody
Jill Ann Spaulding has her French-manicured paw on the pulse of the zeitgeist. She was playing Texas Hold 'Em poker at the professional level... More >>