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Top Shelf
... My favorite novel of 2018 is Andrew Martin’s Early Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is smart and scuzzy, bleak and funny, sexy and depressing--and none of that “by turns” shit either...
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The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
... administration policy that separates young children from their undocumented parents. In short, the dehumanizing treatment of Mexicans has long defined the international boundary with our southern neighbor...
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Outrageous Clarity: The Fictions of Amélie Nothomb
... introduction. Here are some options that might have more impact. Charlotte Shane is a frequent contributor to Bookforum and the cofounder of TigerBee Press. Loving Sabotage (1993) translated by Andrew...
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Football for a Buck by Jeff Pearlman
... more permanent footing had it not been for the meddling of a brash young New York real estate developer. Trump, who bought the New York/New Jersey franchise, the Generals, after the league’s first...
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Bookforum talks to Keith Gessen
... Keith Gessen’s timely and hilarious new novel, A Terrible Country, arrives ten years after his first, All the Sad Young Literary Men. The story follows Andrei Kaplan, an overeducated...
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You Say You Want an Evolution
... black-and-white newsreels made during the protests at Columbia University showed that young people wanted to engage with cinema on their own terms. But what, exactly, did they want? The answer, it...
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In the Fascist Weight Room
...’s Decline of the West and Andrew Carrington Hitchcock’s Synagogue of Satan. At the digital emporium Phalanx Europa, seven euros will get you a poster featuring the inspirational quote “To be a man was to...
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Van Diagram
...’s legendary Acid Tests fractures into two stories: Alpert’s rebirth as Ram Dass and the introduction of Eastern spiritualism to stoned college kids in the West, and a young Dr. Andrew Weil (of Oprah fame...
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Digging Deep
... cleaner’s in “a black ghetto” on the South Side of Chicago and died young, at forty-nine, before Hersh finished high school. The widow--“My mother, Dorothy, from Poland”--and her travails are all but...
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Moscow Analytica
... In one sense, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country picks up where his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, left off. That book’s last chapter is set in 2008, the year it was published, and...
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Of Terror, Tribes, and Spies
... 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...
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Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci
... for Mexico, and plans a trip back to the country with her brother. A young woman who “wanted to be a visual artist, but visualized almost everything in words,” Verónica narrates her story using...
