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Pessimist? Not Really…Charles Simic
For Charles Simic—one of America’s most famous poets, a former poetry editor of the Paris Review and former U.S. Poet Laureate, and perhaps one of the best-known poets writing in English—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s publication of New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 is an especially powerful event; until now, US readers had to buy two “selected poems” volumes, one from Braziller representing Simic’s early poems and another from Harcourt, gathering poems from Simic’s books since the mid-80s.
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Close to Home: NoViolet Bulawayo
NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur Books, May 21) is set in a government sponsored program of forced relocation.
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Past, Present: Gail Godwin
Gail Godwin has been keeping a journal since she was 12. And she’s still writing daily entries today, 18 books and more than 60 years later.
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This is What Democracy Looks Like: David Graeber
As a political philosophy, anarchism encompasses much more than this clichéd stereotype.
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Shocking Pink Is the New Black: Patricia Volk
Patricia Volk believes that everyone has read a transformative book, usually encountered just before the onset of adolescence.
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The Role of a Lifetime: Nia Vardalos
For actress, writer, and director Nia Vardalos, her greatest achievement was adopting a daughter in 2008.
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Maureen Johnson: The Queen of Teen
YA writer Maureen Johnson has had a very good decade.
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A Loving Tribute: Maurice Sendak on 'My Brother's Book'
Editor Michael di Capua is talking about My Brother's Book, Maurice Sendak's final work, as he looks through the folder he kept for the project.
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Just Saying “Yes”: Joyce Carol Oates
One frigid night last January, a diminutive woman in a full-length down coat and decidedly feminine hat raced across the train tracks to the lot where her car was parked.
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Religion Update February 2013: In Profile
Profiles of six notable religion authors with new books coming this spring.
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Religion Update February 2013: Morality and Satire: Erin McGraw
In her newest novel, Better Food for a Better World (Wipf and Stock/Slant), Erin McGraw says she continues to delve into the theme of what it takes to be a good person. But this time she uses a new approach: satire.
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Religion Update February 2013: Regency Pioneer: Julie Klassen
What’s so Christian about the stories of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters?
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Religion Update February 2013: The God of Second Chances: Katie Ganshert
The general plot of Katie Ganshert’s second novel, Wishing on Willows could easily be a feature story in any small town American newspaper.
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Religion Update February 2013: The Faith of Pastors’ Wives: Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
It’s still a bit new for Lisa Takeuchi Cullen to be the subject of an interview. She is accustomed to being the interviewer; until 2009 she was a foreign correspondent and staff writer for Time magazine, and before that worked for Money, Financial Planning, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
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Religion Update February 2013: Tea and Empathy: Lisa Samson
After 20 years of writing and publishing novels, Christy Award–winner Lisa Samson decided to take an extended break.
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Religion Update February 2013: Cat on a Mission: Jim Kraus
To say that Jim Kraus’s life is enriched by the animals who share his family’s home—a miniature schnauzer named Rufus and an “ill-tempered” Siberian cat named Petey—would be an understatement.
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Politics and Prose: Nihad Sirees
A banned writer in an unnamed city on the 20th anniversary of the assumption of power by the unnamed despotic ruler in an unnamed Middle Eastern country... This is the setup for banned Syrian writer Nihad Sirees’s powerful, prescient novel The Silence and the Roar (Other Press, March).
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First Fiction 2014: The Iraq War, a Dozen Ways - Phil Klay
I wanted to get at a range of veteran experiences,” Phil Klay says of his short story collection, Redeployment, which will be published in March by Penguin Press.
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First Fiction 2013: Anthony Marra: Love in Wartime
When Anthony Marra was a college student studying in Russia, he traveled through the Chechnya region. That experience would inspire the 28-year-old Marra, a Whiting Writers’ award winner and current Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, to pen his debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
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First Fiction 2013: Alexander Soderberg: Swedish Suspense
Swedish Suspense Alexander Söderberg was a screenwriter for Swedish television, a script editor, and a script doctor before he wrote The Andalucian Friend (Crown, March), his debut novel and the first in a crime-novel trilogy.