Books

Books

The Tower is a matryoshka doll of a book, which starts with this papery outer layer and, by way of Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, illness, girlhood and more, peels back these different skins to reach the real, inner story: that of the author, denoted here as simply T. The former Times Literary Supplement editor's follow-up to Dandelions - a hybrid of family memoir and cultural history spun out around the central thread of Lenarduzzi's grandmother - also flexes the parameters of fact and fiction.

Memorable recent issues have been devoted to German and Chinese literature. (Its most recent issue focuses on India.) The magazine has also revived its tradition of genre-defying nonfiction, in long-form articles by William T. Vollmann, Mary Gaitskill, Rahmane Idrissa, and the factory poet Xiao Hai, among others. As a writer, Meaney is best known for his essays, which appear in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, as well as for his reportage in Harper's.

Call of Duty has spent the better part of three decades as one of the biggest video game franchises, and much of that is thanks to the popularity of its recurring Zombies mode, which has been a major part of the series ever since 2008's Call of Duty: World at War. Since then, the mode has appeared in 13 Call of Duty games, including this year's upcoming Black Ops 7, launching November 7 on console and PC.

In Raymond Carver's classic short story "A Small, Good Thing" (you may also remember it from Robert Altman's Shortcuts), a mom orders a cake for her son's birthday party. Shortly after, the kid gets hit by a car on his way to school and falls into a coma. The baker, unaware of what's happened, keeps calling the birthday boys' parents and telling them to pick up the goddamn cake. And then-spoiler alert- the kid dies.

When David Arsenault takes down a worn, leather-bound 19th-century book from the winding shelves of the Boston Athenaeum, he feels a sense of awe - like he's handling an artifact in a museum. Many of the half a million books that line the library's seemingly endless maze of reading room shelves and stacks were printed before his great-great-grandparents were born. Among fraying copies of Charles Dickens novels, Civil War-era biographies and town genealogies, everything has a history and a heartbeat.

The Chronicles of Narnia Deluxe Hardcover Box Set comes with a slipcase with vibrant artwork featuring Aslan. As mentioned, this hardcover set launched in July with a fairly high $140 list price. The current $55.15 price is an all-time-low for the box set; it was selling for close to $80 earlier this month. You'll miss out on the fancy metallic cover, decorative page edges, and foil-stamped case, but the Deluxe Hardcover Box Set is a better choice for kids and anyone who

Wreck can stand on its own, but chances are, you'll want to read both books. Wreck's cover, like Sandwich's, features a soft-focus photograph of an alluring porch-fronted all-American house that telegraphs that this novel is not about a real estate teardown. In fact, the title refers to Rocky's state after being knocked off-kilter by a serious health scare and a local train crash that hits too close to home.

You can find everything online these days, and people know that, but they're tired of picking books from anonymous star reviews,

Anyone wanting to read an advance copy of Miriam O'Callaghan's hotly anticipated memoir was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal what was in it pre-publication. This is standard practice in publishing, though in the case of Life, Work, Everything it is hard to fathom why it was deemed necessary, since there is very little here that anyone could have revealed even had they wanted to.

I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step, he told the PA news agency. AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone, he said. And it can do similar things with painting and music composition and with almost all of the creative arts.

Imagine you're shopping for your next read. You scan the bookstore shelves, registering the promising titles and colorful covers as you go. Among them are several older classics you promised yourself you'd read one day, and you feel a familiar pang of guilt over having not picked them up yet. Is today the day? No, you decide, and opt for a newer book that is currently trending on social media.

When she tries to deliver a get-well card from the child's classmates, she learns that the girl, Dinah, has been mysteriously spirited away and that official records of her fate are sealed. The more resistance Sarah encounters in her quest for Dinah, the harder she searches, hiring a sad-sack private investigator, Joe (Adam Godley), to help her. This leads to further murders and mysteries, sending Sarah, along with Joe's wife, Zoë (Thompson), on the road to save the little girl.

An obsessive, tortured domesticity runs through the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator of "Pond" (2015) forms an uncommon attachment to her seaside cottage: she takes great pains with the arrangement of her breakfast and her garden, organizing crockery "into jaunty stacks along the window ledge" and spending a memorable chapter on the deteriorating control knobs of her mini-kitchen. "Checkout 19" (2021), by contrast, is haunted by the absence of a proper home and the despair of unbelonging.

The volume presents Kapur's continuing engagement with significant developments in art practice, discourse, and exhibitions in the twenty-first century. Many of the contributions were originally spoken, demonstrating the relationship between rhetorical utterance and call to action invoked by the book's title. If an understanding of "cultural conjuncture"-a crucial concept borrowed from cultural theorist Stuart Hall-has inflected the field of postcolonial and diasporic cultural studies, Kapur emphasizes "disjuncture" as its necessary correlate to make "the contours of the contemporary jagged and sharp, therefore legible."

What the 62-year-old does detail well in this memoir are his harrowing struggles with heroin and the loneliness he long battled because of his sexuality. Bottum shares some genuinely perturbing stories of sexual encounters he experienced with adult men while underage, growing up in Southern California. His journey to coming out in the pages of The Advocate is a fraught and sometimes frightening one. That interview he gave to Lance Loud, he reveals, was sold to the British rock press without his consent.

Linda is attracted to planes-not as a hobbyist, but she does display an enthusiast's ardor and knowledge. While she has a flight-tracking app on her phone and can identify the type and number of an aircraft by sight, for Linda, the 30-year-old protagonist of Kate Folk's novel Sky Daddy, these flying hunks of metal are erotic objects. She maps the language of human romantic relationships onto her attraction, giving all the planes male pronouns and admiring their "ankles" and "rear ends."

Inspired by owner Craig Florence's time working at Paris's Shakespeare and Company (a hub for English-speaking expat writers and readers since 1951), Mother Foucault's is an old-world paradise for artists and intellectuals. The aesthetic lends authenticity to Runkel's Platonic dialogues. "I took my boyfriend here on our first date so he would think I was cool," he says. And the kids love that Florence doesn't care if they buy anything.

Theo Chang is thrilled his family adopted a new cat, but the cat is less thrilled about his new home. Can Theo find a way to befriend the kitty before his family gives up and takes him back to the shelter? Both sweetly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, with black-and-white illustrations by Pura Belpré Honor artist Kat Fajardo, Theo Chang welcomes readers into Mrs. Z's class where friendship and fun rule the school.

When a federal judge decided to allow a sprawling class-action lawsuit against OpenAI to move forward, he read some "Game of Thrones" fan fiction. In a court ruling Monday, US District Judge Sidney Stein said a ChatGPT-generated idea for a book in the still-unfinished "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George R.R. Martin could have violated the author's copyright.

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author's home and was put on trial. York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl.

So, let's return to classic literature and take a look at a 19th-century idea that feels remarkably relevant today. It's the danger of too much thought. Many writers have understood the power and peril of thought (and consciousness) long before algorithms began to mimic it. They felt, unlike the LLMs, that the very thing that makes us intelligent can also make us suffer.

Amy Griffin is the founder of G9 Ventures, an investment firm that has backed a slew of cool, woman-centric brands and startups including Goop, Spanx, and Bumble. She's a mother of four; the devoted wife of a strapping blond billionaire ex-hedgefunder; and a fixture in the Instagram tributes of the rich and famous ( Reese, Gwyneth, Mariska: they all sing Griffin's praises).

The railway network across Britain and Ireland is constantly evolving, so it's no surprise then that the Rail Atlas of Great Britain and Ireland is now in its 16th edition. Long compiled by Stuart Baker, following his death in 2020, the previous edition was completed by railway cartographer Joe Brown. Now, in this latest edition, Brown takes full editorial control for the first time.

"One thing that I realized while writing is that heists are actually easier to execute than we see in movies and on TV shows," Piazza tells Bustle. "So I might have been the least surprised person on the planet about the Louvre heist. In fact, I felt so validated in how I executed it on the page. I also think my version is a little sexier."

When you ask someone whether they have ever seen a ghost, you are asking them whether they believe in the inexplicable. Some people are more accustomed to the idea than others: In different folklores, throughout history, ghosts appear as omens and lost spirits; they signify regret, pain, open endings. Then there are the ghosts that haunt not a culture, but a person.

with Nguyen, who will share her journey as the child of Vietnamese refugees and how her family's story shaped her life and career. The daughter of immigrants, Duong is the first Vietnamese American and the first Asian American woman to serve on the County Board of Supervisors. Proceeds from the event support the San Jose Public Library Foundation, which raises money for the library's programs and resources. Autographed copies of Boat Baby are included with ticket purchases.

Baker & Taylor, one of the nation's largest and longest-serving book and media wholesalers for libraries, recently announced the unexpected closure of its business. B&T has served the nation's library community for nearly 200 years, and the Contra Costa County Library system is just one of many nationwide that have relied on them for decades. The abruptness of this closure presents a significant challenge across the industry.

Robert remembers cold windy days in the Mission when many of its trees were little more than promising twigs in the ground! Since, he fell in love with the opinionated poets, artists, and eccentrics who enlivened the Cafe La Boheme. He hopes that others will find some of his photos as surprising as they are to him. Like his hero, Chiang Yee, the author of The Silent Traveller in San Francisco, Robert enjoys being an inconspicuous observer of the world as he discovers it.

The titular summer people are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day.

The work of late journalist and author Ed Moloney work showed the power people's stories can have Ed Moloney, who died this week at the age of 77, was one of the most significant authors on the Troubles. Although we now live in a time when books like Say Nothing are international bestsellers and are adapted for television, Moloney's pioneering research of paramilitaries took place in a very different political atmosphere.

Set deep within the trenches and back alleys of American independent film, Ferrara drills deep into the bedrock, probing fresh wounds and ancient scar tissue alike, emerging with a storied, practically unbelievable career in the pictures. Unbelievable that is, if belonging to anyone other than Abel Ferrara. The director of such masterworks as Bad Lieutenant, Ms. 45, King of New York and Tommaso, Ferrara has seen his fair share of devastating setbacks and miraculous triumphs,