Books
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A Cockeyed Optimist: Oscar Hammerstein Was No Stephen Sondheim
Laurie Winer’s new book, “Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical,” takes the measure of Sondheim’s mentor and…
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A Trailblazing Black Cartoonist’s Work: ‘It’s Unapologetic, and It’s the Truth’
Barbara Brandon-Croft’s series “Where I’m Coming From” was the first by a Black female cartoonist to be picked up by…
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A Louche Life Set to a Show-Tunes Score
In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway…
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Conversations With Friends, in a Russian Jail Cell
A debut novel from Kira Yarmysh, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, offers an intimate look at political imprisonment.
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As Wallace Stevens Once Put It: Hi!
Poetic beginnings — first lines, or first poems in collections — do a lot of work in setting the tone…
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The 19th-Century Cult That Gave Rise to an Incel Assassin
Susan Wels’s “An Assassin in Utopia” links President Garfield’s killer to the atmosphere of free love and religious fervor that…
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Storming Normandy in 1346
“Essex Dogs,” the first novel in a projected trilogy by the historian Dan Jones, imagines a hard-bitten band of mercenaries…
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In ‘Reckoning,’ Eve Ensler Unveils a New Name but Familiar Targets
Writing now as V, the creator of “The Vagina Monologues” tackles racism, colonialism and sexual violence in a raw and…
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The Yale Library That’s a Temple to Learning … and a Portal to Hell
In “Hell Bent,” Leigh Bardugo continues the fantastical journey she began in “Ninth House.”
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A Quarter-Life Crisis Handled With Grace and Guts
MAAME, by Jessica George You can get a sense of Maddie Wright’s life from her Google searches, which pop up…