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A Mortifying Turtleneck No Cure for Heartache
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely...
View ArticleA Mortifying Turtleneck No Cure for Heartache
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely...
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A Pair of Atheists Agree: Time to Let Go of God
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95. With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of...
View ArticleA Pair of Atheists Agree: Time to Let Go of God
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95. With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of...
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Wage Slaves in Their Natural Habitat
Office life—that Beckettian game of Whac-a-Mole—is the subject of Then We Came to the End, an amusing debut novel from Joshua Ferris. Told in the collective first-person, a know-it-all “we” (like The...
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Bolaño Returns, With Youth, Decay, Revolution
"God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books.” This wistful observation comes from an aging, drunken, failed poet in The Savage Detectives,...
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A Decade After Drown, Is Junot Díaz’s First Novel Worth the Wait?
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAOBy Junot Díaz Riverhead, 340 pages, $24.95 We’ve waited a long time for a novel from Junot Díaz. The Dominican-American author blasted the publishing world in 1996...
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Making the Same Mistake Twice; And Why a Smart Buy Probably Isn’t
PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS By Dan Ariely HarperCollins, 245 pages, $25.95 I missed the deadline with this book review. Although I had plenty of time to work on...
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The Mini-Malcolms
NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESSBy Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Yale University Press, 293 pages, $26 SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIORBy Ori...
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The Fascination of What’s Difficult
2666By Roberto BolañoFarrar Straus and Giroux, 898 pages, $30 Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver...
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Graphic Novels on the Verge, A Genre Trapped in a Time Warp
Black Hole, by Charles Burns. Pantheon, 368 pages, $24.95. Journalists have been heralding the rise of the graphic novel for decades. Ever since Will Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, the...
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Brooklyn Family Feud Adds Flavor to Well-Told Tale
“Everyone in my family tells this story, but everyone starts it in a different way.” That’s how Rich Cohen begins his own story about Sweet’N Low, the artificial sweetener developed by his grandfather,...
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Brooklyn Family Feud Adds Flavor to Well-Told Tale
“Everyone in my family tells this story, but everyone starts it in a different way.” That’s how Rich Cohen begins his own story about Sweet’N Low, the artificial sweetener developed by his grandfather,...
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Mommy, Dearest Memoir From a Talented Novelist
In his surrealist fiction, Donald Antrim likes to send up human failing, nudging the anxieties of flawed, hyper-aware characters into the realm of the absurd. His neurotic protagonists want to be...
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Mommy, Dearest Memoir From a Talented Novelist
In his surrealist fiction, Donald Antrim likes to send up human failing, nudging the anxieties of flawed, hyper-aware characters into the realm of the absurd. His neurotic protagonists want to be...
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