Books & Authors
Plotting Thrillers in the Fog of China
So much of what is known of China’s beating Communist heart is guesswork. But not for the spy novelist.
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Disturbing the Comfortable
Stories rooted in horror, fable and fairy tale, by the Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
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Double Agency
In this novel, British and American spies clash in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics.
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Return to Progress
Collected columns denouncing the Bush wars and tax cuts and recounting the fits of nerves that President Obama coolly overcomes.
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The Pain That Binds
In this novel, a girl’s disappearance sets off ripples of grief in a small South Dakota town.
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Andre Agassi’s Hate of the Game
Bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily, Andre Agassi’s is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete.
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Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories
Carol Sklenicka’s biography and a long-overdue “Collected Stories” spotlight Carver’s growth as a writer and illuminate his poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish.
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Taking No Prisoners
A historical novel about the ferocious Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and the slaves who followed him.
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Into the West
A thorough, well-wrought political history of James K. Polk’s presidency and the triumph of Manifest Destiny.
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Word Made Flesh
Questions for, quibbles with and tributes to the sometimes inscrutable protagonist of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
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TBR: Inside the List
I’m a sucker for tales of extreme weather, so my curiosity was piqued by Linda Howard’s “Ice,” new at No. 8 on the hardcover fiction list.
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Crossroads: How Can We Help the World’s Poor?
Humanitarians are fiercely divided about what helps poor people. It’s clear that doing good is harder than it looks.
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Fiction Chronicle
Books by Janet Skeslien Charles, Robert Hicks, Anita Diamant, N. M. Kelby and Rebecca Stott.
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A Soldier’s Story
A writer revisits the 1918 battle that left its mark on his grandfather.
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A Jaundiced View
The lives — as well as the livers — of the characters in Will Self’s beguiling linked stories are in very bad shape indeed.
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Haleh Esfandiari: Prisoner of Tehran
A love of Iran underlies a scholar’s memoir of surreal interrogation and solitary confinement in Tehran.
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Books of The Times: ‘You Know That Chicken Is Chicken, Right?’
Jonathan Safran Foer uses his literary gifts to give the reader some very visceral, very gruesome descriptions of factory farming and the slaughterhouse.
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