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Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, T. Geronimo Johnson’s The Occidental Book of the Dead, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Rush all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

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In 2006, when I started writing the book that would eventually become my debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, I shared my f...

Cross-stitch watercolor by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

When Aly changed hir name, hir mother heard more than a new set of syllables. Margaret told researchers in Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith’s study that she felt Aly had “divorced the whole family.” Before the change, Margaret and her husband had been sending...

Jean Echenoz’s Jérôme Lindon recounts, in sixty spare, affectionate, sometimes lightly barbed pages, the twenty-year relationship that its author enjoyed with his publisher, a legend of the French literary establishment. The story begins in 1979 with an unexpected summons to Lindon’s office, and a contract for a first novel that virtually everyone else had turned down;...