Books

Book Review: “We Had it Coming and Other Fictions” — Bursts of Existential Powerlessness

November 19, 2025
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Luke O’Neil doesn’t have any solutions to our political dissipation, but he certainly knows how to diagnose its illnesses.

Book Review: “Pre-Code Essentials” — When Moviemakers Played the Game of Evade-The-Censor

November 18, 2025
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Film fans who love the style and spirit of early-thirties Hollywood will have to control themselves from drooling happily all over this fabulously written, photo-filled volume.

Book Review: Canceling Equality — Julia Ioffe’s Personal and Political History of Russian Women

November 13, 2025
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This heartbreaking book documents the history of contemporary Russia through its women.

Poetry Review: Pennie for Your Thoughts — Social Media, Abuse, and Scottish Verse in “poyums annaw”

November 11, 2025
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This is poetry that sets its goals, finds the right language to reach them, hits hard, and recovers an ancient purpose for verse that has fallen by the wayside in recent times: consolation.

Book Review: Putting Words into Dreams — Poet May Swenson

November 5, 2025
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Optimistic, a canny survivor, relentless, genderfluid—poet May Swenson described herself as “I am one of those to whom miracles happen.”

Book Review: “Coyote” Bio Focuses on Sam Shepard’s Turbulent Life but Skims Lasting Impact of His Work

November 5, 2025
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The biographer puts far too much emphasis on Sam Shepard’s louche life, neglecting to provide much analysis about the value of his stage work, particularly on whether it will endure.

Children’s Book Reviews: The Natural World and Beyond

October 30, 2025
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Three beautiful new picture books for kids about nature, color, and gardening will inspire, inform, and delight.

Book Review: A Life Condemned — and Reclaimed: Gary Tyler’s “Stitching Freedom”

October 23, 2025
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“Stitching Freedom” sheds necessary and welcome light on the sick and damaging history and current state of incarceration in this country.

Book Review: John Guare’s Funhouse Mirror: The Playwright Joins the Library of America

October 23, 2025
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A generous serving of what theater critic John Lahr calls playwright John Guare’s “funhouse-mirror reflection of American life’s caprice and chaos in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

Book Review: Ha Jin’s “Looking for Tank Man”: Memory, Erasure, and the Weight of Exile

October 21, 2025
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This is the story of powerless little people caught up in a confusing maelstrom, at the receiving end of senseless violence.

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