“Chalk Drawings,” by Aziz Hazara © The artist. Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata, India With David Unger’s brilliant translation of Mr. President (Penguin Classics, $17.99), by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Asturias, readers…

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The lost worlds of Abdulrazak Gurnah

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On Willem Frederik Hermans

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“Domestic Pig—Sus scrofa domestica,” by Henry Horenstein, from the series Animalia © The artist Gustave Flaubert famously wanted to write “a book about nothing,” sustained only by “the internal force…

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On Vladimir Sorokin

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Hernan Diaz dismantles the American dream

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“Representation #16?18 (matchbook),” by Cynthia Greig © The artist. Courtesy Clark Gallery, Lincoln, Massachusetts Readers of Elif Batuman’s delightful first novel, The Idiot, will need no introduction to its sequel,…

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Seeing Auden in a new light

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“Gary Indiana Veiled,” 1981, by Peter Hujar © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society, New York City Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as…

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Jennifer Egan’s old-world internet novel

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On the forgotten father of film

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Self-portrait with Scorpion, by Leonor Fini, from Leonor Fini: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, which was published last year by Scheidegger & Spiess © Leonor Fini Estate, Paris/Artists Rights…

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The elusive fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett

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On Thom Gunn

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On Maria Montessori

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Schiller’s Garden House, Jena, by Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger © akg-images By the year 1800, the French Revolution was over, the ancien régime a thing of the past, the…

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The ecstatic cult of Nicolas Cage

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On Evan S. Connell

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Hanya Yanagihara and the pandemic novel

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Women in Calcutta waiting in line for food during the Bengal famine of 1943 © William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock As the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen approaches ninety, he…

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Haile Selassie I © Chronicle/Alamy If you’ve considered accidental divinity—mortal men being worshipped as gods—you’ve probably thought it a rare phenomenon, something relegated to a distant past. But as Anna…

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A writer’s quest

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Battle at Langada and Komboti, by Panagiotis Zographos. Courtesy AUTH Archive Collections This year marks the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, which freed the territory from the Ottoman Empire and…

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George R. Stewart’s novels of natural disaster

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The forty-seven lives of Fernando Pessoa

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A church destroyed by the Islamic State in Qaraqosh, Iraq, December 2016 © Chris McGrath/Getty Images The longtime war reporter Janine di Giovanni’s powerful new book, The Vanishing (Public Affairs,…

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On Italo Svevo

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Has Jonathan Franzen found the key?

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