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Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

Revenge Tragedy

From The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, a memoir by Austin Reed, published this month by Random House. Likely completed in 1858, the manuscript was discovered at…

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Madrid, New Mexico

By Kenneth Irby (1936–2015), whose collected poems, The Intent On, was published by North Atlantic Books in 2009.

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If Looks Could Kill

From posts by residents of Oakland, California, to NextDoor and Glenfriends, two online social networks for neighbors.

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Foot Patrol

From a complaint filed in October 2014 on behalf of a woman who was harassed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Harris County, Texas. In October 2015,…

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Divide and Conquer

From a mathematics textbook for children between six and twelve years old, published by the Islamic State’s ministry of education. The Islamic State distributed copies of the textbook to schools…

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Sorry not Sorry

From Living on Paper, a collection of Iris Murdoch’s letters published next month by Princeton University Press and Chatto & Windus. Murdoch (1919–99) was the author of numerous novels, including The…

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Purity in Pink

By David Searcy, from Shame and Wonder, a collection of essays that was published this month by Random House. Searcy is the author of two novels, including Last Things (2002).

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Search History

From queries submitted by telephone and in person to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989.

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Invisible City

By Justin E. H. Smith, from a work in progress. Smith’s fourth book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton), will be published in June. At the end of August, the oldest…

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Thanks, Obama

From entries made since 2009 to the U.S. Protocol Gift Unit Federal Register Report, which records items given by foreign dignitaries to federal employees.

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Pain Quotidien

From a list of approximately 70,000 diagnostic codes included in the International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification, which was adopted by U.S. health-care providers in October.

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Shit Talkers

From an audio recording entered as evidence in a 2014 lawsuit filed by a man identified as D.B., who claims that he inadvertently recorded his colonoscopy on his cell phone.…

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Seminal Theories

From Of Beards and Men, by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, which will be published next month by the University of Chicago Press. Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State…

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Naked Ambition

From a contract prepared by a casting agency for extras in the television show Westworld, which is scheduled to air on HBO next year.

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Road to Nowhere

By László Krasznahorkai, from Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a travel memoir that will be published next month by Seagull Books. Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.…

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1/29/84 N.Y.C.

By Allen Ginsberg (1926–97), from Wait Till I’m Dead, a volume of his uncollected poems that will be published by Grove Atlantic in February.

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There’s the Rub

By Brian Blanchfield, from Proxies, an essay collection that will be published in April by Nightboat Books. Blanchfield is the author, most recently, of A Several World, a volume of…

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Release the Darkness to New Lichen

By Peter Gizzi, from the spring issue of Granta. Gizzi’s selected poems, In Defense of Nothing, was published last year by Wesleyan University Press.

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PETA Peeve

From a complaint filed in June against the State of North Carolina by PETA and other plaintiffs, including Beth A. Sparks, an adviser to the National Opossum Society who “has…

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Object Lesson

From When the Sun Bursts, by Christopher Bollas, out this month from Yale University Press. Bollas has been a practicing psychoanalyst for more than forty years.

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February 2016

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