4 Great Fictional Detectives
The books in this month’s column have something in common: unforgettable main characters.
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The books in this month’s column have something in common: unforgettable main characters.
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Maureen Callahan’s lurid “Ask Not” paints the Kennedys as mad, bad and dangerous for women to know.
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The journalist Richard Behar communicated extensively with the disgraced financier. His rigorous if irreverent book acknowledges his subject’s humanity.
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Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.
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A Guide to Ismail Kadare’s Books
Kadare received the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005. In his books, the prolific Albanian author offered a window into the psychology of oppression. Here’s where to start.
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The Angel of Death Has Some Reservations About His Job
Joy Williams distills much learning — from philosophy, religion and history — into 99 stories about the guy who takes your soul.
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A Summer Home in Maine With Centuries-Old Secrets — and a Ghost
J. Courtney Sullivan’s “The Cliffs” is a haunted house mystery steeped in historical context.
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Shay Youngblood, Influential Black Author and Playwright, Dies at 64
She wrote memorably about her upbringing by a circle of maternal elders and the life lessons they imparted, and of her yearning for the mother she lost.
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How Much Do You Know About the American Revolution?
This short quiz tests your knowledge of certain Revolutionary War events and books about the era.
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Jailhouse Correspondence Gives Bernie Madoff the ‘Final Word’
The journalist Richard Behar communicated extensively with the disgraced financier. His rigorous if irreverent book acknowledges his subject’s humanity.
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Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues.
A brisk new biography by the National Book Award-winning historian Tiya Miles aims to restore the iconic freedom fighter to human scale.
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Have You Heard the One About the School for Stand-Up Comedy?
In “The Material,” Camille Bordas imagines the anxious hotbed where the perils of being a college student and the perils of being funny meet.
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Anthony Fauci, a Hero to Some and a Villain to Others, Keeps His Cool
In a frank but measured memoir, “On Call,” the physician looks back at a career bookended by two public health crises: AIDS and Covid-19.
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Millions of Americans Watched ‘The Apprentice.’ Now We Are Living It.
As a new book by Ramin Setoodeh shows, Donald Trump brought the vulgar theatrics he honed on TV to his life in politics.
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She wrote memorably about her upbringing by a circle of maternal elders and the life lessons they imparted, and of her yearning for the mother she lost.
By Penelope Green
Kadare received the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005. In his books, the prolific Albanian author offered a window into the psychology of oppression. Here’s where to start.
By Amelia Nierenberg
This short quiz tests your knowledge of certain Revolutionary War events and books about the era.
By J. D. Biersdorfer
Often compared to Orwell and Kafka, he walked a political tightrope with works that offered veiled criticism of his totalitarian state.
By Rusha Haljuci
Ikbal and Idries Shah delighted London society with their romantic tales of the East. The only problem? They made them up.
By Robyn Creswell
Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.
By Lyta Gold
The writer and director, famous for making theatergoers squirm in their seats, says he feels most at home wherever the outsiders gather in his native city.
By Megan McCrea
The books in this month’s column have something in common: unforgettable main characters.
By Sarah Weinman
In a memoir and a novel, the characters deal with grief by singing in front of strangers.
In “All the Worst Humans,” Phil Elwood recounts a career spent engineering headlines for some of the world’s villains.
By Jim Windolf
In “Swimming Pretty,” Vicki Valosik connects the evolution of an unlikely sport with the century-long struggle of women to be taken seriously in the water.
By Jennifer Schuessler
In Fernanda Trías’s novel “Pink Slime,” one woman holds out in her town after an environmental disaster, trapped in a limbo of indecision.
By Lydia Millet
Selected paperbacks from the Book Review, including titles by Darrin Bell, Maggie Smith, David Friend and more.
By Shreya Chattopadhyay
Bullwinkel’s debut novel sheds light on the culture of youth women’s boxing through an ensemble cast of complicated characters. It packs a punch.
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Our columnist reviews June’s horror releases.
By Gabino Iglesias
From silly rhymes to lively sound effects to stealthily-building suspense, these old standbys and new classics have something for everyone.
By Elisabeth Egan
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.
By John Yoon
The author of “Funny Story” churned out five consecutive No. 1 best-sellers without leaving her comfort zone. How did she pull it off?
By Elisabeth Egan
For Pride Month, we asked people ranging in age from 34 to 93 to share an indelible memory. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.
By Nicole Acheampong, Max Berlinger, Jason Chen, Kate Guadagnino, Colleen Hamilton, Mark Harris, Juan A. Ramírez, Coco Romack, Michael Snyder and John Wogan
“It doesn’t make me esteem Wharton less. If anything, I take comfort in it, as a novelist.” Her own smash book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is out in paperback.
In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).
By Nathaniel Rich
Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.
By Daisy Fried
Rather than bemoan pop culture’s most divisive genre, Emily Nussbaum spends time with the creators, the stars and the victims of the decades-long effort to generate buzz.
By Eric Deggans
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He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.
By Adam Nossiter
In his beautiful memoir, “Do Something,” Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.
By Andrew O’Hagan
Two decades after his death, a collection of over 800 works that the first president of Senegal owned is moving from France to Dakar.
By Aida Alami
In “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Dean Jobb vividly recounts the life and times of the notorious criminal — and tabloid fixture — Arthur Barry.
By Darrell Hartman
A massive, mysterious grizzly takes on symbolic weight in Julia Phillips’s moody and affecting second novel.
By Jess Walter
A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.
By Scott Veale
Richard Hatch gave up a career as a physicist to become a magician — and a one-man historical preservation society dedicated to a German author killed in the Holocaust.
By David Segal
Summer is here! Try this short quiz about books that happen to be set in popular vacation destinations.
By J. D. Biersdorfer
“The New Breadline,” by Jean-Martin Bauer, a veteran food aid worker, chronicles a growing problem that should not exist — along with the harmful policies that have exacerbated it.
By Alec MacGillis
In “Frostbite,” Nicola Twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.
By Sallie Tisdale
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Tracy O’Neill’s memoir, “Woman of Interest,” recounts her yearlong quest, which culminates in a trip to Korea.
By Sloane Crosley
With her new book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” Adeyemi is wrapping up her best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series. The journey hasn’t been easy.
By Wilson Wong
Our columnist has summery new recommendations.
By Olivia Waite
A dinner party at the other woman’s house; the evening before a jail sentence.
After getting her start by self-publishing, Freida McFadden is now the fastest selling thriller writer in the United States.
By Alexandra Alter
Starring an undergraduate student at Oxford, Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic life.
By Brian Dillon
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