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Till We Can Keep an Animal by Megan Voysey-braig
Dead Woman Talking
A review by Gaiutra Bahadur
Near the end of this debut novel, the daughter of a rape victim sits in a circle of gangsters smoking crystal meth in the Cape Flats, a place freighted with the injustices of South African history. In real life, its slums, sequestered between city and sea on the outskirts of Cape Town, rose up to house many of the 60,000 people kicked out of District Six when the apartheid regime claimed their central-city neighborhood exclusively for whites in 1966. The daughter, Imogen, received in the housing projects as a "white woman with a clipboard," is there for research, and sitting next to her on ...
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard
A Man of Extinction: J.G. Ballard's Distinctive Cast of Mind
A review by Nicholas Fraser
For a long time, the spirit of pinched traditionalism pervaded postwar British culture. Writers such as Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow vied with one another to reproduce old-fashioned narratives, upholding the values of gentility via the tired means of drawing-room comedies or novels of manners. In the tabloid press, violence was freely described, but it remained localized, confined to gory particulars. Something must have appeared attractive about this culture of self-imposed restraint, but it was hard for writers to confront with any confidence the contemporary condition of the human race. ...
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
A review by Celia McGee
Princeton Architectural Press is about to release a book on Frida Kahlo that features a cache of purportedly rediscovered paintings, journals, and trinket-laced archival materials, which experts are denouncing as fake. The publication looks to do little for the reputation and life story of the complicated Mexican artist except to further cheapen them. But as a venture into the territory where fiction stalks fact, it handily illustrates the romanticized notions of history's celebrities that get cast back over time. Barbara Kingsolver provides a foil to this tendency with The Lacuna, all the ...
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Meditations (Modern Library Classics) by Aurelius Marcus
"To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one"
A review by Doug Brown
Meditations was not Marcus Aurelius's title; he never gave this collection of musings a name. When first posthumously published, it was given the title To Himself, perhaps a more fitting description. Meditations is a collection of self-probings, thoughts, and reminders similar to those found in journals kept by folks the world over. It is arranged into twelve books, thought to possibly correspond to scrolls; as he filled one up, he'd get another. The first book has a theme of acknowledgements and lessons learned from people in his life and other influences, but most of the other books are...
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis works literary magic in miniature
A review by Erika Recordon
To savor or to gorge? It's a question that's been weighing heavy on Lydia Davis fans all month. Spanning 20 years and four volumes of short fiction, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is here. There are 198 stories, an overwhelming number for any writer. But Davis is a woman of economy, and many of her pieces run only a page or two in length (some stop at a single sentence). So it's tempting to carry this book with its punchy orange cover everywhere you go. You can read one boiled-down narrative at a time all over town -- in the waiting room at a doctor's office, on the bus to work, in...
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard
A City Unbottled
A review by Joy Connolly
Visit the ruins of Pompeii today, stroll to the famous "Villa of the Mysteries," and you will discover a room of enigmatic frescoes gleaming in the dim light, their crimsons and golds seeming as rich and resplendent as if they were painted yesterday. In a sense, they were: the walls of the room were heavily and repeatedly retouched, waxed and varnished with petroleum when they were discovered a century ago. The frescoes are typical of Pompeii's charms, the way its many relics seem to testify to the constancy of human invention and encourage us to forget the passage of time. Stroll around the...
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