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Colson Whitehead’s half-true Harlem

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A revisionist view of the drug wars

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Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite.…

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Human Lock, by Vojtěch Kovařík. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, Brussels, New York City The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos (New Directions, $25.95), refers…

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On Chuck Berry

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The novel form is capacious and elastic, in some instances deployed like a magnifying glass on a water droplet, and in others as a panoramic lens to encompass a vast…

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On losing a father and finding Stoicism

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Left: “Milan Kundera, Prague, 1969,” by Gisèle Freund © The artist. IMEC/Fonds MCC/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York City. Courtesy Galerie Franz Swetec, Düsseldorf. Right: “Rising of Rudé právo,” by…

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Charles Portis and the art of getting out in time

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The long century of Ernst Jünger

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Self-Portrait, 1901, by Pablo Picasso © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York City/Musée National Picasso-Paris Picasso is to art as Kleenex is to tissues. Few artists have…

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Outback Gathering, by Mel Brigg © The artist. Courtesy Wentworth Galleries, Sydney Anyone who has seen the Australian outback knows that it defies description. The country’s pioneer history is relatively…

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How not to write an action movie

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Malaga Girl, Navigation of Bones, by Daniel Minter © The artist. Courtesy Greenhut Galleries, Portland, Maine Like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Paul Harding’s imaginary New England…

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On Cormac McCarthy

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Pearl, by Gail Spaien © The artist. Courtesy Nancy Margolis Gallery “Animals are in trouble all over the world.” So begins Justice for Animals (Simon and Schuster, $28.99), a call to…

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How not to become an anarchist

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The Ottoman army capturing Belgrade, from a sixteenth-century manuscript © Gianni Dagli Orti/Shutterstock The finest historical fiction—Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, for example—renders the strange grippingly familiar; so too do…

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A provocative history of Indigenous America

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On Casanova

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The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli. Courtesy the Uffizi Gallery, Florence When telling a story, history’s imperfect record sometimes insists upon inconvenient gaps. This is the case with Botticelli’s…

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On Elizabeth McCracken’s irreducible fiction

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Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois

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The battles over T. S. Eliot’s legacy

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Photograph of Elias Canetti, 1983, by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. Courtesy Tate Archive In 1980, the year before Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in…

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VN-K-001 (detail), by Lyndon Barrois Jr. Courtesy the artist Few writers can inhabit multiple characters with equal intensity and vivacity, and most who can are, of course, playwrights or screenwriters.…

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What time did to Christopher Hitchens

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