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Books

To the Afterlife

Grace Schulman casts her steady eye on mortality in her new collection of poems, “The Marble Bed.” Or, more accurately, she casts her eye on the things around her and they describe mortality back to her. 

Nov 12, 2020
The Credibility Gap

Donald Trump is by far the most egregious liar ever to reside in the White House, but he is hardly the first, writes Eric Alterman in “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse,” a kind of American history textbook for our unsettled times.

Nov 5, 2020
Book Markers 10.29.20

On the new books front: Suzanne McNear’s “Swimming Lessons and Other Stories” and Janet Lee Berg’s “Restitution,” a follow-up to “Rembrandt's Shadow,” historical fiction about one family’s art looted by the Nazis.

Oct 29, 2020
An Essayist’s Arabesques

Roger Rosenblatt’s “Cold Moon” is like an extended prose poem, with runs of free associations and streams of consciousness tackling major themes of life, death, and grief.

Oct 29, 2020
Strangeness in Suburbia

The character-driven second book by the singer-songwriter turned novelist Suzzy Roche is set in a Catholic enclave in Pennsylvania in 1961. It is a social satire with sympathy, realism with softened edges.

Oct 22, 2020
Major Jackson Reads for Writers Speak

The M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton will welcome the poet Major Jackson for an online reading and talk on Oct. 28 at 7 p.m.

Oct 22, 2020
Book Markers 10.15.20

Alastair Gordon talks up the Barnes Coy architecture firm and interviews a principal, and Grace Schulman headlines a celebration of Turtle Point Press via Canio’s Books.

Oct 15, 2020
Poems of Faith and Doubt

Bill Henderson’s “The Family Bible” is a collection of plainspoken, candid poems centering on his struggle with the fundamentalist, literalist religion of his childhood and youth, with its contradictions of a loving and angry God and stories of kindness and violence.

Oct 15, 2020
Truth and Dare Atop the C.I.A.

Chris Whipple’s “The Spymasters” fleshes out the triumphs, tragedies, and turf wars of national intelligence with a trove of new details and insights from an astounding cast of characters.

Oct 8, 2020
The Interior Project

In “For Now,” a book-length essay in Yale’s “Why I Write” series, Eileen Myles enacts the very strategies identified as essential to the author’s poetics. The essay chronicles its own construction, so that we learn not only why Myles writes, but also how this particular piece of writing came to be. 

Oct 1, 2020
Off the Straight and Narrow

Betsy Carter’s new novel is an intergenerational tale of family pleasures and tensions in a small town. Sweet and warm, it’s nice to be in her world the way it’s nice to look through a bakery’s glass case.

Sep 24, 2020
Love and Identity in Wartime

“Paris Never Leaves You,” an extraordinary new novel by Ellen Feldman of East Hampton, cuts between Paris in 1944 during the late stages of the Nazi occupation and the New York City publishing world of 1954. 

Sep 17, 2020