Book Review: “All of This” by Rebecca Woolf and “This Story Will Change” by Elizabeth Crane
As such, we see the couple doing boring, happy things. They acquire furniture, get a dog and agree that the husband will take care of home repairs and pest control while the wife will do the dishes and the laundry. “Do you even want to get into a discussion of gender roles here,” Crane asks parenthetically, “or can we accept that they both More...
The Stabbing of Salman Rushdie Renews Free Speech Debates
Two years ago Salman Rushdie joined prominent cultural figures signing an open letter decrying an increasingly “intolerant climate” and warning that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood More...
Elana Dykewomon, Author Who Explored Lesbian Lives, Dies at 72
(“I figured if I called myself Dykewomon,” she joked in an interview with J: The Jewish News of Northern California this year, “I would never get reviewed in The New York Times. Which has been true.”) Her More...
Jan Longone, Influential Scholar of Food History, Dies at 89
Jan Longone, a curious, cordial and diligent food scholar who started a mail-order cookbook business from her Michigan basement that led to friendships with towering culinary figures like Julia Child and grew More...
“Worser” by Jennifer Ziegler – The New York Times
WORSER, by Jennifer Ziegler A 12-year-old boy solemnly explains a piece of writing he has just read aloud at a meeting of his middle school Lit Club. “I should mention that I wrote this entry when I was More...
Raymond Briggs, Who Drew a Wordless ‘Snowman,’ Dies at 88
Raymond Briggs, the children’s author whose cheeky illustrations dignified workaday British life and an audacious breadth of emotions, most prominently in the wordless escapades of “The Snowman,” died More...
Crazy Eddie’s Life Was Insane!
RETAIL GANGSTER: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy EddieBy Gary Weiss336 pp. Hachette Books. $29. The most famous TV ad in the Orwellian year of 1984, carefully themed to the novel named for this year, was More...
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About ‘Bad Sex’ but Were Afraid to Ask
Given the prominence of the raunchy 2020 hit song “WAP,” by Cardi B, featuring Megan Thee Stallion, I loved learning that in the 1970s “WAP” stood for “Women Against Pornography,” a feminist group More...
Review: ‘Three Assassins,’ by Kotaro Isaka
THREE ASSASSINS, by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Malissa The killings that take place in “Three Assassins” — and there are many — are disarmingly mundane. Kotaro Isaka describes murder the way a More...
Review: ‘Diary of a Void,’ by Emi Yagi
DIARY OF A VOID, by Emi Yagi, translated by David Boyd and Lucy North Blame it on social media, on synoptic attention spans, whatever: The speculative conceit reigns in contemporary publishing, where few novels More...