Books

Book Review: “The Last Bookseller” — A Breezy Memoir of Life in the Rare Book Trade

December 8, 2021
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The arrival of the internet adds a sour-grapes ending to an otherwise fairly compelling narrative.

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Children’s Book Review: Girls Rule! And Other Ways to Inspire Kids This Holiday Season

December 7, 2021
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Some splendid, new (and newish) books that are sure to inspire young children.

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Book Review: “Milk Fed” — The Glory of the Zaftig

December 1, 2021
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For all the sensual lushness of Melissa Broder’s writing, that hard center remains, one where appetite invites awareness, bringing with it pain as well as satiety.

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Poetry Review: Writer Alain Mabanckou — Taking Life Both to Heart and in Stride

November 30, 2021
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Take a dive into any of Alain Mabanckou’s works in English — and definitely score a copy of the new translation, As Long As Trees Take Root In the Earth, beautifully crafted and bound. Vive la Poesie!

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Book Review: “Punch Me Up to the Gods” — Stories That Need to be Told

November 30, 2021
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A stunning indictment of homophobia, racism, and toxic masculinity, particularly among African Americans, Punch Me Up to the Gods holds a mirror up to America, a mirror before which many of us will not want to linger.

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Poetry Reviews: Paul Muldoon and Others

November 27, 2021
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Paul Muldoon is anxious to file dispatches from the front lines of Our Lives Now. That is one of the characteristics that separates him from most other poets writing today.

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Book Review: “Museum of Fine Arts Boston: 1870 to 2020, An Oral History” — Questioning the Elite

November 24, 2021
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This is an invaluable gathering of interviews, an impressive excavation of institutional memory that not only recognizes the MFA’s grandeur but its many deficiencies as well.

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Book Review: Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” — A Critical War of Words

November 23, 2021
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The jury’s in. The critics who agreed with an early assessment that 1975’s Dhalgren is a “literary landmark” get to touch champagne flutes and congratulate one another.

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Book Review: Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Harsh Times” — A Menagerie of Monsters Great and Petty

November 22, 2021
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Above and beyond Mario Vargas Llosa’s political outlook, his latest novel proves that he remains at heart a master storyteller.

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Book Review: “The Anomaly” — We Know Less Than We Think

November 20, 2021
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The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves.

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