The problem with writing manuals

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Elif Batuman takes on the M.F.A.

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Conversion tales are perennially popular, but there is less of an audience for stories about what comes after — the daily struggle to live out your faith when the first…

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Paul Auster’s multitudes

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George Saunders is the most humane American writer working today. He need not ask, as Sheila Heti did in the title of her novel, how a person should be. He…

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The allure of animal nature

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Zadie Smith and the limits of being oneself

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Until the U.S. government got wind of it, the sharpest critic of the Mormon practice of polygamy was Joseph Smith’s legal wife, Emma. But as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explains in…

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The inventions of Javier Marías

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The rise and fall of the Romanovs

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“I understand the large hearts of heroes,” wrote an ecstatic Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”: The courage of present times and all times, How the skipper saw the crowded…

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Why TV Got Good

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The Saga of Halldór Laxness

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Hell hath no fury like a Hitchcock scorned. After the fat man with the famous profile signed Tippi Hedren to a seven-year contract and put her through what was then…

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The inscrutable sincerity of Nell Zink

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Thomas De Quincey’s bad habits

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A motley crew steers Anne Carson’s FLOAT (Knopf, $30). There’s Edmund Husserl, Jean-Luc Godard, Joan of Arc, Pablo Picasso, mad Hölderlin, Hegel, a chorus of Gertrude Steins, and Carson’s noble,…

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s authorial intrusions

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The meaning of the game

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Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism

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It doesn’t matter that Ursula K. Le Guin has been winning awards for writing about aliens, wizards, and imaginary worlds since the 1960s — the label “science fiction” gives her…

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The rise of Trump

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The return of the Brat Pack

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Across the seven volumes of the Recherche, Proust mentions only one living artist by name — the fashion designer Mariano Fortuny. “Is it their historical character, or is it rather…

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In 1996, the Libyan writer Hisham Matar was living near the National Gallery in London. For six years straight he had been going to the museum, sometimes as often as…

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Sybille Bedford’s prudent hedonism

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Seamus Heaney’s journey to the underworld

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The past and future of dating

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