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Eye on AI: A Q&A with Nina Schuyler
In her suspenseful and thought-provoking new novel, Afterword, Nina Schuyler’s characters struggle to know themselves even as they push technology to the edge of human understanding. A brilliant...
View Article‘Any Orange Is Orange’
Since Happy started saving lives, he’s gotten superstitious. You learn quick—don’t call him up on his shift and ask, How’s the day going? Any calls? because then for sure the radio will start, and...
View ArticleOut of the past: ‘The Postcard,’ by Anne Berest
Many stories are, in a sense, mysteries, asking some version of the same question: what is this life, and how are we meant to live? There are, of course, no definitive answers to these questions—only...
View ArticleBlood will out: ‘Not Forever, But for Now,’ by Chuck Palahniuk
“There exists a heaven for the carnal,” writes Chuck Palahniuk in his most recent novel, Not Forever, But for Now (Simon & Schuster; 256 pages). An ultimately lackluster addition to what was once...
View ArticleHis Way: ‘Bartleby & Me,’ by Gay Talese
“When I joined the Times in the mid-1950’s, I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies,’’ Gay Talese states in his delicious new collection, Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener...
View ArticleBeing there: ‘In the Orchard,’ by Eliza Minot
Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite books. Michael Cunningham’s reworking of those themes in The Hours is also terrific. If you’re a fan of either of those, In the Orchard, Eliza Minot’s third novel,...
View ArticleHigh Plains Drifter: ‘Pastures of the Empty Page’
“Literature, as I saw it then, was a vast open range, my equivalent of a cowboy’s dream.’’ So wrote Larry McMurtry about how life at his father’s Idiot Ridge cattle ranch changed forever when a World...
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Turkey? Non, merci
One of the worst turkey dinners I ever had in my life was in France. It was the mid-1980s, and I was on a year abroad in Paris. The program’s well-intentioned directors must have thought that this...
View ArticleCoup de Vieux
For Tom Magee thrice in three nightsthe dead have come my waytwice it is youtwin cities accentrough and lowlike a globusin your throatI can hear the timbreyet I cannot carryback a word you say then...
View Article‘Good News’
Like a dog, I walked in through the back door and sniffed the air attentively. A rich, woody scent met me. Before I had a chance to call her name, Kira’s head poked out from behind the open...
View ArticlePhone call
Caroline is standing by the north ball fields in Central Park in the snow. It is February. There is some kind of construction going on—or it was going on—the big yellow trucks have stalled, but still,...
View Article‘Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine’
“It’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers.’’ — Bob Dylan, to music journalist Paul Zollo Indeed. But as the late great Professor Irwin Corey (who once...
View ArticleHerbert Gold, a San Francisco bohemian to the end
The author Herbert Gold died on November 19, at the age of 99, and it’s still hard to believe that somebody so kinetic, so sonorous, could be gone from San Francisco, his longtime home. It wasn’t...
View Article‘Animals’
Nedu named the chicken Otuanya because it was missing an eye, a film of pink tissue sealing the space where the organ should have been. He summoned his father, older sister, and unsmiling mother to...
View ArticleDesert solitaire: ‘Death Valley,’ by Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder’s new novel, Death Valley (Scribner; 240 pages), begins with its unnamed protagonist peeing—and trying to meditate—in a Circle K bathroom during a getaway to Joshua Tree. This bodily...
View ArticleInto the Abyss: ‘Ripe,’ by Sarah Rose Etter
In Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe (Scribner; 276 pages), we follow Cassie, a 33-year-old San Franciscan working at a tech company. Her life is seemingly secure; she makes a comfortable six-figure salary and...
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The dead: On writing a thriller set in the rock world
I met Sarah Tomlinson last year in Los Angeles at a book event for a mutual friend. It was an unseasonably cool night, but spirits were high—our friend’s book was doing well, and it was almost summer....
View ArticleThe Voices of the Whales
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers 1. I’m interested in the language of animals. 2. Whales, especially the humpback whale and the various subspecies of blue whale, are known to make repetitive...
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What’s missing in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film, begins with Osage men somberly performing a traditional pipe ceremony. It cuts to a slow-motion scene of tribal members exuberantly...
View ArticleGinsberg in America: ‘Material Wealth,’ by Pat Thomas
“Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’’ So prophesized Allen Ginsberg long ago, channeling Walt Whitman in the epigraph to “Howl,’’ a literary debut that...
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