New books out this week look at everything from pressing political concerns — Original Sin — to perspective-altering riddles about life itself, like in Is A River Alive? and The Book of Records.
fiction
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‘The Emperor of Gladness’ is a beautiful novel about hard work and found family
Ocean Vuong’s sweeping new novel centers on a depressed 19-year-old college dropout who becomes the caregiver to a widow with dementia.
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Newly published stories show a different side of Ian Fleming and Graham Greene
The latest issue of “The Strand Magazine” contains rare stories by the iconic midcentury writers Ian Fleming and Graham Greene.
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6 new books this week showcase top talent: Ocean Vuong, Ron Chernow and Dave Barry
A host of beloved authors have new books hitting shelves this week, including a memoir by humorist Barry, a Mark Twain bio by Chernow and essays by Richard Russo.
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A filmmaker in Nazi Germany strikes a deal with the devil in ‘The Director’
When do compromises turn into full-blown capitulation? Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel draws on the true story of German film director G.W. Pabst.
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5 new books to check out this week — including Isabel Allende’s latest
My Name Is Emilia Del Valle is the newest novel from the prodigious Chilean expat, now in her 80s. Plus, a personal history of the orange, a Josephine Baker history and having kids in the digital age.
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Supermarket displays of oranges will never look the same after reading ‘Foreign Fruit’
In her new hybrid memoir, Katie Goh unravels the multitudes citrus fruit contains, in lockstep with mythologies of colonialism, inheritance, and identity.
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Canadian writer Canisia Lubrin wins $150K Carol Shields literary prize
The judges of the annual prize for female and nonbinary writers praised Lubrin’s debut short story collection, Code Noir, for breaking “new ground in short fiction.”
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There’s some Revolutionary reading coming your way this week
The second volume in Pulitzer-winning historian Rick Atkinson’s planned trilogy on the American Revolution publishes Tuesday. Plus a graphic memoir, short fiction, and “the secret life” of a cemetery.
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This terrifying horror novel proves: Nothing is old if you make it new
Nat Cassidy’s wildly entertaining novel is a superb example of how to work with clichés. When the Wolf Comes Home might sound like a werewolf novel — but it’s an entirely different animal.
