Reviews
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Bait and Switch
Like a well-planned itinerary, the blueprints of James Lasdun’s stories are thoughtfully delineated, and each step feels purposeful and sure.
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By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
PART I: WHY RUMSFELD, WHY THIS BOOK? Donald Rumsfeld is my grandmother.
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The Age of Orphans
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
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Tissue of Flesh and Light
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
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Love Is a Plane Crash of the Soul
Two Latin American novels, published in English for the first time, stake out radically different artistic territory.
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Life Is Beautiful
Vicki Forman’s Bakeless Prize-winning memoir recounts the premature births, and deaths, of her children.
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The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour…
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Beautiful Horrible
“I like to see the most aggressive of [horror movies]—Dawn of the Dead, for instance—as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators
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Through a Glass Darkly
“I don’t know where we got the idea that helping sick people means keeping them away from the jaws of death at all costs…”
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Freedom Fighters
A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.
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Loitering in the Wrong Places
The book, with its halting, unbeautiful, disjointed lines, proves her awareness of the difficulty of writing poetry about war, trade, immigration, Hurricane Katrina, and George Bush. These are intensely politicized issues, claimed by a blunt, politicized language.
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What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Five short stories modeled on the works of the old masters make up this smart, witty first collection