The first short story Shirley Hazzard ever wrote was plucked from the slush pile of the New Yorker by William Maxwell, the magazine’s long-standing fiction editor. Maxwell, who would go on…
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Phil Klay’s first novel takes a line from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Kinship’ as an epigraph: “Report us fairly, how we slaughter / for the common good.” It’s a theme continued from Redeployment…
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The unnamed narrator of A Luminous Republic believes in bad omens. On arriving in a new city with his family for a civil service post in the early 1990s, their car struck a…
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Many of the stories in Emma Cline’s provocatively titled short-story collection feature older men whose stars are fading, numbing themselves from the world’s increasing indifference to their influence with booze, pills…
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Since Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office in spite of his crude “locker-room talk”, masculinity has been a hot topic. As three new books demonstrate, the causes and consequences of…
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“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” begins Elena Ferrante’s new novel, her first since the global sensation of the Neapolitan quartet.…