LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A very smart and funny and (what’s somewhat surprising) endearing first novel by a previously well published nonfiction writer, …
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George Ernsberger
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12/10/21
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Christmas gifts, column 2:Creation: Art Since the Beginning by John Paul Stonard (Bloomsbury). A nervy title, and in fact a brave undertaking; others will be needed to attest to how perfectly judged …
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George Ernsberger
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12/3/21
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It shouldn’t have surprised me that book distribution is something like crippled this year. Publishing is still mostly in New York, but printing and manufacturing is elsewhere, more than a …
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George Ernsberger
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11/26/21
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Still Life by Sarah Winman (Putnam). Big, rich literary novel. A carefully controlled but free-flowing, almost musical style; episodic in structure, but with an entirely coherent theme that’s …
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George Ernsberger
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11/19/21
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The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury). And another world-famous author the column never heard of (she’s more famous in England than here, I believe, a runner-up for the Brit …
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George Ernsberger
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11/12/21
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Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (Random House). Brilliant writer, neglected here for—well, to be fair, rather than kind, to myself—for only inane reasons. The column did cover his …
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George Ernsberger
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11/5/21
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Where They Wait by Scott Carson (Emily Bestler/Atria). Must be the season: here’s another distinctly original horror novel, the second by the multi-award-winning crime novelist Michael Koryta, …
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George Ernsberger
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10/29/21
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Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Random House).
Her third Lucy Barton novel (depending on how you count; she’s central, again, in this one, and narration is first-person again). An early …
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George Ernsberger
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10/22/21
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The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman (Simon and Schuster).
A lovely novel, intricately worked out and carefully cast, about, yes, people who can make magic; so a fantasy (of sorts—it certainly …
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George Ernsberger
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10/15/21
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Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
For all his (only occasional) crabbiness, and his apparent sense of himself as A Great Writer, there’s just no arguing with the …
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George Ernsberger
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10/8/21
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The Speckled Beauty by Rick Bragg (Knopf).
Bragg, a memoirist/essayist of wit and grace, has been publishing books like this, not exactly philosophical but not exactly not, for a few decades, now. …
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10/1/21
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First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11 by Toby Harnden (Little, Brown).
“In war, the first casualty is the plan,” sounds like an expression of hopelessness; …
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George Ernsberger
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9/24/21
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