Ms. Lonely: Olivia Laing in the Lonely City

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At the end of 'The Lonely City,' Laing does not offer up novel “answers,” either to her own loneliness or the reader’s; it’s not clear, even, whether the book feels loneliness is a problem to be solved.
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The Rise and Fall of the Donald Trump of Detroit

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Rich Republican outsider with zero political experience and open disdain for government claims he has the business acumen to make [fill in the blank] great again -- sound familiar?
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The Solution Is a Gay Socialist Utopia Built for Two

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Created on a website, crowd-sourced in serial, 'Beijing Comrades' is the people’s public fantasy of intimacy. The result is a classic of queer consciousness-raising erotica.
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Men in Tights Crammed into Confined Spaces

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Bachelder’s portrait of middle-class, middle-aged males revolves around football. Full disclosure: In my version of hell, scowling football coaches pace up and down the River Styx, their steady barking of martial commands only interrupted to consult their laminated sheets on which every possible variation on the off-tackle running play is written.
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Lighter, Smaller, Thinner: On Lost Girls and Lost Mothers

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To what should girls aspire when an entire culture, including a culture of smart literary women, values them for how little of them there is?
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A Hint of the Demonic: Photography as a Dark Art

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Félix Nadar personifies photography as an avenging angel who, through the accursed image, makes her terrible will known.
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The Human Deep Within the Machine

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The coming together of the novel’s two plots is the least compelling aspect of 'Innocents and Others.' Its nod to narrative unity is forced, but the best part about the nod is how convincingly it suggests that we were all better off talking to each other in the dark.
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The Great Divide Between Science and Literature Is False

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Diagnosed with a serious illness of his own, Kalanithi found that he needed literary translation of his experiences. When scientific studies and survival statistics offered little, he turned to books: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. He read memoirs by cancer patients. 'It was literature,' he writes, 'that brought me back to life during this time.'
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The Life of Meaning: On Yann Martel’s ‘The High Mountains of Portugal’

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What matters is not whether one believes in a higher power, but rather making use of whatever philosophical tools give life meaning and create vectors by which to effect change in the world.
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Confining Roberto Bolaño’s ‘2666’ to the Stage

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On the stage, Pelletier and Espinoza can’t help but defend the Western values the driver has insulted. As Pelletier lands blows, he cries out, in dialog augmented by the playwrights, “This is for the feminists of Paris!…This one’s for Salman Rushdie!”
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Taste Is the Only Morality: On Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

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'The Vegetarian' is dark, cynical, even antinatalist.
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Against the Anti-Art Literati: On Roberto Calasso’s ‘The Art of the Publisher’

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For the most part, publishing today, whether print or digital, lacks the overarching sensibility that only the good publisher provides.
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We Need to Submit: On David Thomson’s ‘How to Watch a Movie’

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We are, in short, not watching movies -- or living our lives -- with the full capacity that once seemed so natural to us. We are more and more unable to submit, and our films and our lives suffer for it.
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Another Mask: On Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘In Other Words’

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I started Jhumpa Lahiri’s new memoir expecting to find a story about the joys and struggles of learning Italian as an adult, and as a writer. But Lahiri did not write the book I was expecting -- and which I think many other readers might be primed for. Instead, she has written an elegant, if somewhat oblique, memoir about creative crisis.
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Experiments in Biography: On Chris Offutt’s ‘My Father, the Pornographer’

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In 1994 alone, John Cleve wrote 44 novels, including 'Punished Teens,' 'The Chronicles of Stonewall 7: Captives of Stonewall,' and 'Buns, Boots, & Hot Leather.'
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Recognition of Another Sort: On Ethan Canin’s ‘A Doubter’s Almanac’

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Do we want something different, something new, some sense that, with the same words, in the same world, we might, through the workings of fiction, find a way to rethink reality -- and to find the familiar strange, the world an ever bigger, more interesting place?
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A Walk in the Park: On Suzanne Berne’s ‘The Dogs of Littlefield’

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I tucked a copy of Suzanne Berne’s latest, 'The Dogs of Littlefield,' under my arm before being tugged out the door by my basset hound.
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The Contents of His Head: On A.O. Scott’s ‘Better Living Through Criticism’

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This is a rather defensive and sometimes irritable book, an act of muffled aggression by a man besieged and yet conscious of occupying a privileged position in the world.
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