Daily Review

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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Homey Don't Play That!:
The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution
by David Peisner
Atria / 37 INK
$28.00 List Price
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Homey Don’t Play That! by David Peisner
By James Hannaham
Feb/Mar 2018
Despite its obdurate title—which cribs the catchphrase made famous by Damon Wayans’s outrageous character Homey D. Clown from In Living Color—David Peisner’s Homey Don’t Play That! plays practically everything. It dodges and weaves through the biographies of many people, laying down a cultural history

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What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
by Elizabeth Catte
Belt Publishing
$16.95 List Price
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What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
By Frank Guan
Feb/Mar 2018
If there was one book impossible to escape during the eternal election of 2016, it was J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. The Ohio native’s “memoir of a family and culture in crisis,” which detailed his dismal childhood with a substance-abusing single mother and his ascension, through hard work and

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The Friend:
A Novel
by Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Books
$25.00 List Price
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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
By Vivian Gornick
Feb/Mar 2018
I don’t know whether or not The Friend is a good novel or even, strictly speaking, if it’s a novel at all—so odd is its construction—but after I’d turned the last page of the book I found myself sorry to be leaving the company of a feeling intelligence that had delighted me and even, on occasion,

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We Were Eight Years in Power:
An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World
$28.00 List Price
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Coming to Terms
By Hannah Black
Feb/Mar 2018
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power collects eight essays published in The Atlantic between 2008 and 2017, padded with fresh introductions. Three meanings of the time period in the title are apparent. The first refers to the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The second, alluded

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Ultraluminous:
A Novel
by Katherine Faw
MCD
$25.00 List Price
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Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw
By Jordan Larson
web exclusive
A woman with a set of fake names—Kata, Katya, Kasia, Katushka—has returned to New York after eighteen years in Dubai. Glass towers now crowd the Williamsburg waterfront and women yell at her to get out of the bike lane. Bodega cigarettes cost fourteen dollars and smoking in bars is against the law.

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The Years
by Annie Ernaux
translation by Alison L. Strayer
Seven Stories Press
$19.95 List Price
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The Years by Annie Ernaux
By Gili Ostfield
web exclusive
“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” writes Annie Ernaux’s narrator near the end of her 1998 autofiction, Shame. Ernaux takes the sentiment further in the

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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden:
Stories
by Denis Johnson
Random House
$27.00 List Price
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Earth Angel: On Denis Johnson
By Rachel Kushner
Feb/Mar 2018
Dear Astronaut Selection Officer: I am a civilian who would like to be considered for the one-year astronaut training program. I would be most grateful if you would send me information, application forms, and any such material you feel might be helpful in this regard. Sincerely, Denis H. Johnson

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Into the Gray Zone:
A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death
by Adrian Owen
Scribner
$28.00 List Price
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The Body Politic
By Charlotte Shane
Dec/Jan 2018
Anesthesia has been around for over 170 years, and in spite of its inherent drama it’s impressively nonlethal. Current estimates place the death toll at about one in two hundred thousand or even one in three hundred thousand, which means—according to the earnest nonprofit the National Safety Council—that

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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

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

Homey Don't Play That!:

The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution

by David Peisner

Atria / 37 INK

$28.00 List Price

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

By James Hannaham

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

Belt Publishing

$16.95 List Price

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

By Frank Guan

The Friend:

A Novel

by Sigrid Nunez

Riverhead Books

$25.00 List Price

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

By Vivian Gornick

We Were Eight Years in Power:

An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

One World

$28.00 List Price

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

By Hannah Black

Ultraluminous:

A Novel

by Katherine Faw

MCD

$25.00 List Price

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

By Jordan Larson

The Years

by Annie Ernaux

translation by Alison L. Strayer

Seven Stories Press

$19.95 List Price

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

By Gili Ostfield

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden:

Stories

by Denis Johnson

Random House

$27.00 List Price

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

By Rachel Kushner

Into the Gray Zone:

A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death

by Adrian Owen

Scribner

$28.00 List Price

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

By Charlotte Shane

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