Meet the 23-year-old who’s been tasked with “injecting some swag” into the “traditionally conservative New York Times [crossword] puzzle.”
Making the Puzzle More Hip
Taking Off
“Every streetlight is a slightly different hue/of white the squares like the blank faces of robots/offer the Hondas and Toyotas idling in the lot something/like hope and yet I am thinking of all of the people on the planes/landing and taking off the twin miracles of arrival and departure/each of them singing ‘Take Me With You’ whether they know/the song or not they are all singing”. A poem written by Dean Rader on the day of Prince’s death.
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Barack’s Book Club
George Pelecanos is the latest worthy writer to get the Obama bump.
Tuesday New Release Day: Kiefer; de los Santos; Mitchell; Ferguson; Yglesias; Bhutto; True, Quade; Dostoevsky
Out this week: The Animals by Christian Kiefer; The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos; A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell; The Lost Boys Symphony by Mark Andrew Ferguson; The Wisdom of Perversity by Rafael Yglesias; The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto; The Wednesday Group by Sylvia True; Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade; and Notes from a Dead House, a new Dostoevsky translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (whom we’ve interviewed). For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gilbert, Forna, Drabble, Segal, MacFarlane, Winterson, de la Pava, Franzen
New releases this week include The Signature of All Things by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, which you can learn more about in Steve Almond’s review for the Times. Also out: The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna; The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble; Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal; The Night Guest by Fiona MacFarlane; The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson; Personae by Hall of Famer Sergio de la Pava; and The Karl Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ulitskaya; Moody; Cunningham; Parker; Hawke
Out this week: The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya; Hotels of North America by Rick Moody; A Wild Swan: And Other Tales by Michael Cunningham; Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker; and Rules for a Knight by the actor Ethan Hawke. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Waiting for Gatsby.
The new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby is going to be released next summer, rather than on Christmas day as it had been originally scheduled. Too bad; I was really looking forward to the Gatsby themed New Year’s Eve parties, I mean just look at those costumes.
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