Books

Books

The book opens with Pieces, a web of vignettes concerning the fate of amputated body parts, some surgically removed, others lost by accident or acts of violence. In the world of this story, one cannot enter heaven with a body less than fully intact, and the careful provisions that must be made for lost limbs and excised organs animate the business operations and spiritual rites of an entire small town.

Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world, one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: What is loyalty to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual's relationship to the institutions he services?

A couple of years ago, I spent a weekend in Columbus, Ohio. I promise this isn't the setup to a smug New Yorker's unimaginative quip ("longest weekend of my life"). Those were a charmed 48 hours. A few things were on my side: I was escaping parental responsibility (our oldest was applying to high school, a fraught time) and the weather was unexpectedly beautiful (70 degrees in late October, disturbing but delicious). I was in town for work, but my work is, if I'm honest, not difficult. Turn up at the public library and talk? That would take but one hour out of a whole weekend. I had time to kill.

Some people mistake writer Junot Diaz, 56, for a rock star even though he doesn't look like one. The writer who does look like one and who also wanders the halls is Mariana Enriquez, with her gray hair and black clothes. The Argentine is another illustrious participant in the Cosmopoetica Festival, which ended on October 5. What the audacious Leiva fan doesn't know is that he's standing before a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

A previous passenger had abandoned a day-old copy of the Miami Herald between the evacuation-procedure card and the air-sickness bag. As I idly flipped through it, I noticed a story about a local nurseryman named John Laroche and three Seminole men who had been arrested for stealing rare orchids from a Florida swamp. It was a sliver of a story, but I was intrigued by it, by seeing the words "swamp" and "orchids" and "Seminoles" and "plant cloning" and "criminal" together in one place.

Tara-Jean is confused, then frightened, as Cass crowds into her, getting almost nose-to-nose as she searches the young star's face for something that will explain Tara-Jean's stratospheric success and her own failure. "Our faces were so close that her eyes looked like one giant copper eye," Cass recalls. "There were green flecks inside that copper eye. Was that the mark of fate?"

But it turns out the Oakland writer had been keeping the intel quiet for about a month already after Chris Lovely, senior program officer at the MacArthur Foundation, pranked him when delivering the good news. She'd set up a call asking for his input on another person she said was a fellowship candidate. Then, when he got on the call, she flipped the script and told him he'd been selected. It was all kind of a blur, he said in an interview.

In 2023, Terri Lesley was fired from her job of library system director in Campbell County, Wyoming, after 27 years on the job. While those who fired her said it was for performance issues, the decision came amid a battle over LGBTQ library books that some wanted banned from the library system. Lesley stood her ground and was terminated the day after refusing to physically take the books off the shelves.

H.P. Lovecraft is responsible for a long list of classic horror stories that continue to be highly influential in the world of literature, film, television, and video games. The author's blend of unsettling cosmic horror with sci-fi/fantasy and Gothic settings--almost always with an ample dose of weird--is so recognizable that the word Lovecraftian is used to describe stories inspired by his work.

The two-page typewritten manuscript signed by Kerouac in green ink is titled The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing and is dated 15 April 1957, five months before his classic of beat literature, On the Road, was published. It was discovered last year during the disposal of items owned by Paul Castellano, who ran the feared Gambino crime family in New York from 1976 until he was murdered in a hail of gunfire on 16 December 1985.

That was the tricky part, because I could have written a novel on a novel on a novel of my life, but it's like, okay, what parts are people going to care about? What should I expand on? What should we, you know, just maybe brush over, or not put in at all? It really was a collaborative effort between myself, my team, my manager, Mark - so much help on it. And the publisher, ultimately. You know, we submitted everything, and they're like, "Okay, this is maybe a little too much childhood. Let's cut back here, but go deeper on this subject." And so overall, [it was a] very collaborative effort, and it worked.

What if our most productive selves aren't when we're on Zoom calls or churning through emails, but when we give ourselves the space and the time to move, think, and rest? Move. Think. Rest. outlines a compelling new framework for work in the 21st century-one that replaces slowly dying of burnout at your desk with a productivity routine that makes downtime a must-have.

The Academy cited the 71-year-old's compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art. Krasznahorkai is known for his dystopian, melancholic novels, which have won numerous prizes, including the 2019 National Book award for translated literature and the 2015 Man Booker International prize. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been adapted into feature films.

Dominion , the debut novel from Addie E. Citchens, takes its title most obviously from its setting: the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, a small town where the prominent Winfrey family holds a preeminent social and spiritual position in the Black community. But the title also has another meaning, because this is a novel about degrees of power and privilege, and who is permitted dominion over whom.

As a child, McKinnon had loved books about slightly oddball characters, like those found in Roald Dahl books. Her favorite heroine was Pippi Longstocking, whom she played in a kindergarten performance. She loved the character so much that she would show up at school for years in a full-on Pippi costume, complete with pipe cleaners in her hair to mimic the heroine's iconic protruding red pigtails.

how to be brave in the face of that terror-which is a terror we all feel, not just kids. To wit, here I am, at sixty-one, going back to these stories and finding more comfort, more terror, and ever more relevance.

In the aughts, after growing disenchanted with his dream of becoming a Disney animator, he decided cartooning would be his lot in life. When he learned, in the wake of the Great Recession, that The New Yorker was the primary outlet still publishing cartoons, cracking the code of America's idiosyncratic intellectual stand-by became his mission. Until that point, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Ren & Stimpy, and South Park had been his guiding lights ("all those '90s dudes").

At about 2am on the night of 7 April 1990, a fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training coupled with jammed fire doors aiding the spread of the fire and the subsequent release of deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from burning laminates resulted in the deaths of 159 people.

the book is overwhelmingly making the argument that the way Soutine is often discussed, as an Expressionist in the grips of a psychological pain expressed in his work, is not borne out by his life story, the way he felt about his work, or the paintings themselves.

Traveling in Bardo interweaves explorations of impermanence in our everyday existence with Slater's girlhood in America and time spent with her Tibetan family in Darjeeling. Like her great-grandfather before her, she spreads guidance about "bardo" between-states, or periods of life transition, to Western audiences. Change is inevitable, can come at any moment, and only by growing our acceptance of uncertainty and endings can we live more fully. Tibetan bardo teachings help us navigate and embrace life in its sorrow and joy.

Over millions of years, Scrivner reminds us, human beings became more knowledgeable about and sensitized to threats from predators as well as repulsed by and afraid of them. "This imprint," Scrivner writes, "lies at the core of our morbid curiosity," which can serve us well "when threats are placed in a safe context," such as a story, a movie, a "haunted house," or a video game.

Here's the thing, man, wonders the late Ozzy Osbourne in his new memoir. Why would anyone want life advice from me? Yes, he gave us Iron Man, War Pigs, Planet Caravan and so many other metal classics. But, by his own admission, Osbourne was also a criminal, a cheat and an addict, who routinely risked his and others' lives and bit the head off a bat.

"A writer," Saul Bellow once observed, "is a reader moved to emulation." But what if it's also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading-and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.

The Legend of Zelda fans can get the fantastic Tears of the Kingdom Collector's Edition Guide for only $16.66 (was $45) at Amazon as part of the retailer's Prime Big Deal Days early book sale. Like many books in the promotion, the full discount doesn't show up until you click the coupon on the store page and add it to your cart. The nearly $30 discount is the best deal we've seen since the official hardcover strategy guide's publication in July 2023.