Reviews | Harper's Magazine - Part 4
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Reviews

Insight on the latest books, films, theater, and music.

Horror Show

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The nightmare logic of Twin Peaks

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Into the Wild

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Henry David Thoreau as prophet, naturalist, and stealth comedian

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The Lives of Others

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Does the social novel have a future?

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The Escape Artist

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Nicole Krauss and her precursors

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Liberation Struggle

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Discussed in this essay: Chester B. Himes: A Biography, by Lawrence P. Jackson. W. W. Norton. 640 pages. $35. Early in Chester Himes’s first and best-known novel, If He Hollers…

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New Books

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In Marie ­NDiaye’s novel MY HEART HEMMED IN (Two Lines Press, $14.95), Nadia and Ange, a middle-aged couple from Bordeaux, become outcasts. “What sort of wickedness, I ask myself, are they suddenly…

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Getting In and Out

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Who owns black pain?

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Tomb Raiders

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The afterlives of Lenin

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It Wants to Go to Bed with Us

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John Ashbery’s well-spent youth

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Unseen Worlds

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Islam’s forgotten reformation

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Head-Scratcher

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Can neuroscience finally explain consciousness?

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Behind the Fig Leaf

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Mary McCarthy’s sexual revolution

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Door to Door

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Mohsin Hamid’s displaced persons

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Good Plain English

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The problem with writing manuals

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No Fool

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Elif Batuman takes on the M.F.A.

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Life Choices

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Paul Auster’s multitudes

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Wild Things

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The allure of animal nature

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In The Shade

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Zadie Smith and the limits of being oneself

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Likely Story

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The inventions of Javier Marías

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Destruction Myth

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The rise and fall of the Romanovs

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Ready for Prime Time

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Why TV Got Good

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Flesh and Blood

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The Saga of Halldór Laxness

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Are You Kidding?

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The inscrutable sincerity of Nell Zink

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Supping on Horrors

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Thomas De Quincey’s bad habits

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The Man Who Loved Metaphors

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s authorial intrusions

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Tennis Lessons

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The meaning of the game

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In Short

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Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism

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Don the Realtor

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The rise of Trump

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Goodbye to All What?

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The return of the Brat Pack

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New Books

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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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