The Wooster Group, an experimental-theater company in New York, has been doing its ludic, fevered work for forty years now. Though its shows, in description, can sound like bad ideas…

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Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov’s half-century

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Can art make anything happen?

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THE VEGETARIAN (Hogarth, $21) is the first — there will be more, let’s hope — of Han Kang’s novels to arrive in the United States. Published in South Korea in 2007, the…

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In December, on the eve of Pearl Harbor Day, President Obama spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the attack in San Bernardino, California, that left fourteen people…

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Ted Hughes’s evasions

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The night before Aeneas set sail from Carthage, Dido, riven with despair, love, and rage, lay awake, set on her own death. Not so the Trojan. He slept easily aboard…

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When Marnie Was There (2014), an animated feature by the Japanese director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl who befriends the ghost of her grandmother, Marnie, at the…

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Primo Levi and the enigma of survival

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The double life of John le Carré

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In the harsh winter of 1895, Tolstoy wrote a story called “Master and Man,” which tells of a merchant named Brekhunov who, on a day that threatens a blizzard, orders…

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At the beginning of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the top-secret Impossible Mission Force (I.M.F.) is disbanded after a congressional investigation deems it too reckless. Now Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)…

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Two ways of looking at Percival Everett

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Three centuries of American witch hunts

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I just wanted to tap. But in the mid-Eighties and early Nineties, in the well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey, the price of flapping, winging, and shuffling off to Buffalo was…

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Early on in the movie adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel, Beasts of No Nation, Agu, the preteen protagonist, and his unnamed older brother have just pulled off an impish…

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Michel Houellebecq’s immortal longings

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The genius of Joy Williams

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America’s lost culture of opposition

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In the year since Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature, translations of his works have glutted the shelves. Part of this influx has to do with the general…

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At the climax of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 homage to World War II genre movies, a German war hero who’s attending the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film based…

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Franzen and the women

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How sneakers became high fashion and big business

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It starts with a mistake; most stories do. Ex-model Luz and her ex-military boyfriend, Ray, are squatting in a dusty mansion in what used to be Laurel Canyon but is…

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In Season 5 of Louie (FX), Louie is a new kind of superhero. Like Wonder Woman, the canonical superhero he most resembles, Louie’s distinctive superpower is love. With loving understanding,…

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What’s missing in contemporary war fiction

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The ongoing struggle for voting rights

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Before Europe orientalized its eastern colonies, the Jew orientalized himself. Living in exile — amid the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the four Islamic caliphates — he…

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