Popular books, reviews, publications and news
Judging by the new batch of garden books, we’re creeping into a back-to-the-land movement, like what happened in the 1970s but without the macramé.
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This summer’s selection is a modest, back-to-basics palate cleanser after last fall’s celebrity-chef-food-porn-o-copia.
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Elmore Leonard’s latest novel stars three familiar voices in a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal.
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An illustrated autobiography by the Beatles’s court artist Alan Aldridge, as well as books of gig posters, album and book covers and fast-food logos.
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An argument for commuters to ditch the car in favor of the bicycle, for the sake of cities and health alike.
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A novelist’s memoir of escaping dreary England for Tuscany, to relish the landscape, the weather, the food and, most of all, the art.
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This summer, travel for the sake of pure travel is out. Among the current crowd of globe-trotting writers, just about everybody has an ulterior motive.
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An insect physiologist conjures a riot of life from what the less attuned might see as just a standard Northern woodlot.
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In this novel of postwar anxiety, members of a decaying upper-crust English family start to come to sticky ends in their creepy mansion.
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Three memoirs-with-recipes deal with relationships good, bad and absent.
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A book on English, and one on the world’s made-up languages.
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There are two oft-envisioned futures for Israelis and Palestinians, and Benny Morris thinks neither has a chance.
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In this lyrical novel, a couple witness the tragic displacement of people by engineering projects.
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The witty, self-castigating story of how Walter Kirn’s schooling left him “not so much educated as wised up.”
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A wondrously artful natural history of Manhattan that envisions the island as it was when Henry Hudson first sailed up 400 years ago.
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Written in full de Tocquevillean mode, the British historian Simon Schama’s Big Book about America is best when it abandons its election-year campaign tour to search out characters from the buried mounds of history.
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A slight but evocative novella about an unnamed Israeli literary lion, and a collection excerpting four decades of Amos Oz’s writing.
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Small New York towns are the setting for a novel and a collection of very short stories by J. Robert Lennon.
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Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being the darkest and strangest sort of poet.
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A harrowing account of a Doctors Without Borders mission to Afghanistan; part photojournalism, part graphic memoir.
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This riveting final volume to Richard J. Evans’s magisterial trilogy illuminates the endless human capacity for evil and self-justification.
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This life of an Iraqi general helps make sense of the horrors of the past five years by illuminating the murderous quarter-century that preceded them.
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A 1963 novel about a weekend trip, deemed too personal for publication during Janet Frame’s life.
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A film critic recalls a childhood shaded by family secrets.
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This New Zealander’s exploration of Australia, stretching from the 1600s to the present, is part history, part memoir, part fable.
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