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Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Katie Martin / ... Kamala Harris’s Political Memoir Is an Uneasy Fit for the Digital Era
The senator’s new book shows the difficulty of translating short-form virality into a substantive text.
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adoc-photos / Corbis / Getty Debussy’s Radical Search for Simplicity
A biography published 100 years after the composer’s death reveals the worldly trials of an artist known for his airy fantasies.
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Princeton University Press Fairy Tales for Young Socialists
A collection of political fables from late-19th- and early-20th-century Great Britain offers striking allegories that remain pertinent today.
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Katie Martin / The Atlantic The 19 Best Books of 2018
Highlights from a year of reading, including Ada Limón’s The Carrying, Tommy Orange’s There There, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and more
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Bijou Karman The Irony of Modern Feminism’s Obsession With Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.
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Hanna Barczyk Sam Lipsyte’s Lame Send-up of a Guru and His Acolytes
In Hark, the characters are distracted, and their author veers between satire and sincerity.
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FSG Riveting Stories About Restless Wanderers
Chris Power’s debut collection, Mothers, reveals that maternity is an unsettling journey.
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Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty The Language the Poet Knows
A new collection of essays attempts to lend some objective shape to a timeless-seeming challenge: the ongoing balance of voice and form.
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Ian Wright; photo by David Harrison; courtesy of ... The Haunting Last Letters of Sylvia Plath
As tragedy approaches, she is stricken, broken—and at the height of her artistic powers.
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Ints Kalnins / Reuters The Tragedy of Electronic Music
Future Sounds, a new book on the history of machine-made pop and classical songs, suggests that the radical power of the synthetic has largely been forgotten.
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Sergieievk /Belovodchenko Anton / Photoagent / Shutterstock / ... Yukiko Motoya’s Surreal World of Alienated Characters
The unsettling stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are deeply preoccupied with the yawning disconnect between people.
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Joe Raedle / Getty / Katie Martin / ... The Uncommon, Requisite Resolve of Michelle Obama
The former first lady’s new memoir is notable for the revealing glimpses it offers into private moments of fear and frustration.
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Viktoriia1208 / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The ... A Road-Trip Novel That Punctures Political Myopia
Carol Bensimon’s We All Loved Cowboys features a difficult protagonist whose myopia belies the wide, complex world outside her car window.
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Dawit L. Petros / Courtesy of Cassava Republic ... A Brilliant Travelogue That Presents Africa Through a New Lens
A recent book by Emmanuel Iduma expands what writing about the continent can be by paying extraordinary attention to the ebbs and flows of human connection.
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Graywolf Everything Under Is a Dark and Mesmerizing Story About Fate
The 27-year-old author, Daisy Johnson, pulls off several marvels at once in her debut novel, which made the Man Booker Prize shortlist.
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Arsh Raziuddin The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass
His champions now span the ideological spectrum, but left and right miss the tensions in his views.
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Fantagraphics Capturing Europe’s Refugee Crisis Through Comics
In her graphic memoir, Drawn to Berlin, Ali Fitzgerald uses art to illuminate the human dimensions of a situation often sketched in statistics.
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Rune Fisker Jack Reacher Still Won’t Quit, 23 Books Later
The literary hero’s coffee-chugging, cigarette-devouring creator, Lee Child, just released his latest novel. He shows no signs of slowing down.
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Illustration: Celina Pereira; Nationaal Archief / Wikimedia Lucia Berlin’s Harrowing, Radiant Fiction
Having lived a hard life, the late author refused to erase her female characters—or the brutality that deranges them.
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David Polonsky / Pantheon / The Atlantic The Quandary of Illustrating Anne Frank
A graphic adaptation of the teenage Holocaust victim’s diary calls into question which avenues are best for retelling painful, complicated histories.
