Daily Review

Goddess of Anarchy:
The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
by Jacqueline Jones
Basic Books
$32.00 List Price
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Goddess of Anarchy by Jacqueline Jones
By Justin Slaughter
web exclusive
More than a century before Antifa or Occupy Wall Street, thousands showed up to hear lectures on wealth inequality and its discontents from Lucy Parsons, the subject of Jacqueline Jones engrossing new biography, Goddess of Anarchy. A former slave, Parsons transformed herself from a rural seamstress

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The Female Persuasion:
A Novel
by Meg Wolitzer
Riverhead Books
$28.00 List Price
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Daring to Be Good
By Molly Fischer
Apr/May 2018
At a certain point in January 2018, “second-wave” seemed to have become a slur. “The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism,” declared a post on Jezebel—referring to Katie Roiphe, Daphne Merkin, and Catherine Deneuve. A “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been”: This was

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Rachel Carson:
Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment (Library of America)
by Rachel Carson
Library of America
$35.00 List Price
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Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment by Rachel Carson
By Daegan Miller
web exclusive
If you were to saunter through the spruce-scented church of American environmentalism, looking upon the portraits of its saints, you’d first see John Muir, father of the Sierra Club, defender of the Yosemite, a green Abraham with a mossy old-man’s beard. Next to him, his camping companion, Teddy

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The Recovering:
Intoxication and Its Aftermath
by Leslie Jamison
Little, Brown and Company
$30.00 List Price
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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
By Clancy Martin
Apr/May 2018
When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, I was also working on a book about love and deception. My editor at the time, with whom I had no doubt too intimate a friendship—he once sternly but correctly told me, “Clancy, I can’t be both your editor and your

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Aetherial Worlds:
Stories
by Tatyana Tolstaya
Knopf
$25.95 List Price
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Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya
By Joy Williams
Feb/Mar 2018
In Tatyana Tolstaya’s earlier short-story collection, White Walls, a character remarks, “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.” This was marvelous, I thought, one of those wise, wise Russian sayings. I mentioned this to a friend. “Oh that’s all over the

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The Sparsholt Affair
by Alan Hollinghurst
Knopf
$28.95 List Price
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The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
By Emily Gould
Apr/May 2018
A fan of Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece The Line of Beauty has created a Twitter account, @lollinghurst, to document the many epigrams and sly jokes and thrillingly acute descriptions found throughout that novel. These “lines of beauty” don’t just serve to decorate the book; they are the book. “His

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The Rub of Time:
Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
by Martin Amis
Knopf
$28.95 List Price
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The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017 by Martin Amis
By James Camp
Feb/Mar 2018
Great writers aren’t always “good writers.” Dostoyevsky shamelessly repeats himself. Denis Johnson, as Geoff Dyer once put it (fondly), can seem unsure of how a sentence works, and from the fake elegance of periphrasis Henry James gives us no relief. To go by the evidence of his fiction, Raymond

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Stealing the Show:
How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
by Joy Press
Atria Books
$26.00 List Price
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Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television by Joy Press
By Lidija Haas
Feb/Mar 2018
One side effect of the Trump presidency so far—among the mildest and yet, for book reviewers, still very noticeable—has been its distortion of a popular nonfiction genre that wasn’t hurting anyone. Since late 2016, a whole slew of sunny, triumphalist works about the social, political, and cultural

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Directorate S:
The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
by Steve Coll
Penguin Press
$35.00 List Price
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Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016 by Steve Coll
By Andrew Meier
Feb/Mar 2018
Kabul in the summer of 1996 was under siege. A little-known force of young militants had surged north from their base in the south. For months, they had camped just beyond the city limits, raining shells on the capital almost daily. They called themselves religious “students”—or in the local Pashto,

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Empty Set
by Verónica Gerber Bicecci
translation by Christina MacSweeney
Coffee House Press
$16.95 List Price
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Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci
By Andrew Schenker
web exclusive
In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s novel Empty Set, the book’s narrator, an authorial stand-in also named Verónica, is haunted by her mother’s disappearance back when she was fifteen. In the book’s slightly fantastical world, this disappearance is gradual, ghostly: One day, Verónica and her brother noticed

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Fair Game
By Christopher Lyon
POV
On a steamy Friday afternoon that felt more like late July than mid-September, I headed to the annual New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, aiming to learn more about the state of independent art publishing. Run by Printed Matter, the nonprofit organization that promotes artists’ books with evangelical zeal, the fair is now in

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On Joan Didion
By Miranda Popkey
POV
I “She cooked nonstop,” Eve Babitz, the Los Angeles–based artist and author of Eve’s Hollywood, remembers. “She made stuff like beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for thirty-five people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. . . . It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. . .

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Hearing Voices
By Tobi Haslett
POV
Last month, part of the street I live on was renamed “Do the Right Thing Way,” after the Spike Lee Joint. It’s a taunting slap to this little strip of gentrifying Brooklyn. Do the Right Thing, which was shot a few blocks from my building, is a film about racial hatred and police slaughter, but

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Will the Real American Psycho Please Stand Up: Why Donald Trump Was Patrick Bateman’s Hero
By Dan Duray
POV
Recently, I had cause to reread Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 bestseller American Psycho. A lot has been said about this controversial comic novel’s violence, but I think it’s best classified with social satire like Vile Bodies or Speedboat (just with, you know, a homicidal narrator). And as it turns out, despite its twenty-four years, some

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Neoliberalizing Liberal Education
By Jim Sleeper
POV
A good liberal education has three dimensions—learning, teaching, and citizenship building—each of which the journalist Fareed Zakaria has mishandled enough in his own academic career so that he misrepresents them for the rest of us in In Defense of a Liberal Education. I review that book in Bookforum’s summer issue, but before the predictable coronation gets too far along, here

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Daily Review

Goddess of Anarchy:

The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

by Jacqueline Jones

Basic Books

$32.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Justin Slaughter

The Female Persuasion:

A Novel

by Meg Wolitzer

Riverhead Books

$28.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Molly Fischer

Rachel Carson:

Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment (Library of America)

by Rachel Carson

Library of America

$35.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Daegan Miller

The Recovering:

Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

Little, Brown and Company

$30.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Clancy Martin

Aetherial Worlds:

Stories

by Tatyana Tolstaya

Knopf

$25.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Joy Williams

The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

Knopf

$28.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Emily Gould

The Rub of Time:

Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

by Martin Amis

Knopf

$28.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By James Camp

Stealing the Show:

How Women Are Revolutionizing Television

by Joy Press

Atria Books

$26.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Lidija Haas

Directorate S:

The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

by Steve Coll

Penguin Press

$35.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Andrew Meier

Empty Set

by Verónica Gerber Bicecci

translation by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

$16.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Andrew Schenker

By Christopher Lyon

By Miranda Popkey

By Tobi Haslett

By Dan Duray

By Jim Sleeper

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble