Discussed in this essay:  Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus. Knopf. 288 pages. $26.95. A Girl’s Guide to Missiles: Growing up in America’s Secret Desert by Karen Piper. 336 pages. Viking. $27.…

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Nick Drnaso’s hypnotically grim graphic novels

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Why the criminal justice system is ill-equipped to prosecute rape charges

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Sleep gets a bad rap in the United States. Despite the threats and cajolings of the CDC, which has deemed chronic sleeplessness a serious danger to the nation’s health, and…

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James Wood’s return to fiction

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Deborah Levy’s foremothers and heiresses

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The strangest part of acquiring my green card was the medical exam, which culminated in an inspection of my breasts and “external genitalia.” Underwear lowered to my knees, I stood…

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The uses and abuses of psychedelics

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Rachel Cusk’s unforgiving eye

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It’s hard for bookish people not to romanticize the act of reading—as a spur to imagination and compassion for others or just an escape from whatever real-life trap you may…

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Helen DeWitt’s uncompromising fictions

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The bowdlerization of Jean Rhys

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The impossible work of motherhood

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The year 2017 was, I presume, an awkward, anxious moment to be named poet laureate of the United States. What the writer owes the collective and where she fits within…

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Alan Hollinghurst’s break with tradition

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The troubling response to a memoir of incest

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Does fiction matter in a post-fact age?

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The surprising legacy of a ninety-year-old peace pact

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My first and still most vivid memory of a Woody Allen movie is of the scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)…

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Three novels of Egypt’s repressive present

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The Armies of the Night fifty years on

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A philosopher’s flat-footed meditations on the beautiful game

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Elizabeth Hardwick’s political conscience

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When you consider the savagery of your run-of-the-mill fairy tale, our use of the term to connote “romance” or “idealization” smacks of nothing more than romance and idealization — a…

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Jennifer Egan’s shallow depths

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Feminist struggles are labor struggles

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When last we heard from Isabel Archer, she was on her way from London back to Rome, where her husband, the cruel, cosmopolitan aesthete Gilbert Osmond, was waiting. That’s how…

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The nightmare logic of Twin Peaks

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