In trying to sum up the experience of having spent the last ten years editing the poetry of Marianne Moore, most recently in the New Collected Poems, I think of a recent classroom interaction I had. Toward the end of a course on...
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Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...
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The madness of March is past, and true to form—here in New York, at least—“lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches.” What does that mean? It’s National Poetry Month! Starting today, we will regularly post new pieces related to all things poetry. Expect...
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We're pleased to reveal the cover for Robin Sloan's Sourdough, his follow-up to his bestselling debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Here it is, with some words from Robin Sloan's intermittent but secret-filled newsletter. I'm not even going to bother with a...
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Édouard Louis's The End of Eddy is an unflinching portrayal of the French working class and the racism and homophobia that its author grew up surrounded by. Here he explains why every word in the novel is true.
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Earlier this month at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn, Kanishk Tharoor was joined by fellow FSG author John Wray to celebrate the launch of Tharoor's debut short story collection, Swimmer Among the Stars. As trains crossing the Manhattan Bridge rumbled overhead, Tharoor and Wray...
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Ishion Hutchinson's poetry collection House of Lords and Commons was released to wide acclaim. All Things Considered said it was "ragged and fiercely beautiful;" The New Yorker praised Hutchinson's "exquisite" sounds: "clusters of consonants . . . and the vowels so...
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On March 26, “Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture,” a traveling exhibition of the great architect’s papers, sketches, and models, arrives at one of his most celebrated buildings, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Wendy Lesser, author of the new Kahn biography,...
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Hideo Yokoyama's detective novel <a href="Six Four, about a cold case and the conflicts within a police department, was first released in Japan to wide acclaim. Yokoyama's carefully plotted, high-tension novel seemed perfect for U.K. and U.S. readers that had been devouring books...
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Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between...
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It’s Emmanuel Carrère who stopped me from writing this article. Right at the moment when I’d planned to knuckle down and sort through the disparate ideas that had occurred to me during the four years I’d spent translating his works, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which...
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This year marks the 40th anniversary of John McPhee's Coming into the Country, a work of long-form nonfiction charting the tensions between the perception of a wild Alaska and the reality of increasingly inaccessible wilderness. The book is a beloved classic in Alaska,...
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Paris has always had a ‘taste for tumult’, as Théophile Lavallée noted in 1845, with its ‘hurried, seething, tumultuous’ population, but today it presents a serene face to the world, in spite of all this revolting and murdering. To take a stroll through the...
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Snowflakes danced through the evening light. The man’s legs were stiff as he stepped from the taxi. A forensics official in a police-issue overcoat was waiting outside the entrance to the station. He ushered the man inside. They passed a work area for duty officers...
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On the living room carpet in Crescent, Irene was trying to teach Lisa to play Parcheesi. Lisa couldn’t follow the action, but she loved the dice, the way they rattled in the little blue cup. Was three too young for board games? Her mother...
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Rachel Cusk's novel Outline, was published in 2015 to wide acclaim—it was listed as one of the New York Times's Best Books of the Year. It told the story of a woman, Faye, facing down a tremendous and terrible loss, through a series...
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I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett’s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston’s South End. I’d read Knott’s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was...
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Emily Witt's book, Future Sex, was described as “Joan Didion meets fetish porn” (A.V. Club) when it was published this summer. A few weeks after the presidential election, Witt sat down with writer Anna Wiener at Green Apple Books in San Francisco,...
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Daphne Merkin’s daring memoir about her lifelong struggle with depression received a fantastic review from Andrew Solomon on the front page of the February 5th, 2017 issue of The New York Times Book Review, which was especially gratifying since This Close to...