Did Wonder Woman fail feminism?

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Denis Johnson’s heart beats for the lowlifes and fuck-ups, drunks and speed freaks, the losers who are on their last score and the scavengers feeding on the edges of foreign…

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The facts in the case of Haruki Murakami

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Elena Ferrante’s existential fictions

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Cyberspace” is where old footage — and old ignorant prejudice — lives forever. The term made its fictional debut in a monologue by the disgraced hacker hero of William Gibson’s…

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The legacy of the First World War poets

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New evidence on the old mystery of the Neanderthals

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In the year 564 b.c., a pankratiast named Arrichion stepped into the ring at the Olympic games. Pankration was a nasty mélange of wrestling and boxing, very popular with the…

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The horseman among myrtles, the four horns and four carpenters, the measuring line, the candlestick and two olive trees, the flying scroll, the women and the ephah, the four chariots:…

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Creating the Lost Generation

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The invention of the narcissist

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s encyclopedic novels

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Robert Coover returns to realism

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When five brightly balaclava’d members of the Pussy Riot collective climbed atop the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012 to chant “Our Lady, Chase Putin…

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First, collect all the details you can on all the people you encounter — this will turn them into “characters.” Second, search this trove for the most interesting connections among the…

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John Updike, Yes-Man

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Joshua Ferris’s half-baked novel of ideas

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How the detective escaped his creator

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Last fall, the Man Booker Prize, the premier award for fiction in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, announced that it was coming to America. Presumably Edward St. Aubyn had already…

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The origins of today’s mass extinction

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The fickle career of Carl Van Vechten

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Discussed in this essay: The Kennan Diaries, by George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigliola. W. W. Norton. 688 pages. $39.95. Pity the man’s poor wife. To peruse this generous selection from…

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John Florio — lexicographer, raconteur, and supposed model for Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Holofernes, in Love’s Labour’s Lost — was born in London in 1553 to an unidentified Englishwoman and an Italian Protestant who’d…

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The trial of 12 Years a Slave

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Is E. E. Cummings a serious writer?

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It is inevitable that some readers will take from Evelyn Barish’s biography of the life and misdeeds of Paul de Man the notion that literary theory is a crock. The title…

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America’s self-help gospel

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The limits of autobiography

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