The Smithian

Easy is back, narrating a new novel, “Little Green”…that picks up where “Blonde Faith” left off. He is, if not entirely alive, then at least present, navigating a 1967 Los Angeles he barely recognizes in the wake of both the Watts riots and the Summer of Love.

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The author has delivered a blow-by-blow account of the tawdry compromises, Republican intractability and factional fighting within the Democratic Party…Congress comes across as the nation’s grandfather: antiquated, inconsistent, as slow-moving as it is dull-witted.

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Anyone openly seeking vengeance is unfairly dismissed in the legal system as irrational, unreliable and somewhat unhinged. Rosenbaum convincingly argues for knocking down the false distinction between justice and revenge, for rescuing revenge from its taboo status.

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Since the news from Cleveland broke earlier this week, I have been thinking about Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room.” Published in the autumn of 2010, “Room” is narrated by a five-year-old boy named Jack who, along with his twenty-six-year-old mother—“Ma”—is imprisoned in a one-room structure by a man referred to only as Old Nick. Jack is the product of rape, but his mother strives to keep the truth of their situation from him, maintaining the illusion that their eleven-foot-by-eleven-foot prison is the extent of the real world…

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…the story is strongest…in Shida’s determination to reconcile traditional beliefs with what she learns from the nurse in the new village…readers will relate to her struggle between family and independence.

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The core of the book is about life inside the juvenile justice system, portrayed with the grit and depressing realism of someone who knows.

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…a library’s worth of literature inspired cocktails. Scholarly sips for word nerds…and the people who love them.

This is a strange book.

…all the markers of a novel written in the…Southern gothic tradition…references…to race, poverty, the blues, voodoo and an ill-fated brothel…the Southern literati have raised an eyebrow at its author: Bill Cheng, a 29-year-old Chinese-American from Queens who has never set foot in Mississippi.

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Mo Yan…has a deft way with similes: salty, sometimes gross, usually unexpected.

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The 704-page two-volume collection of black-and-white photos depicts…a 47-day journey tracking 7,000 reindeer across Northern Siberia and a roughly 525-mile hike in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia.  The massive art edition retails for $9,000, weighs a combined 130 pounds—packaging and bookstand included—and stands nearly four feet tall.

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…a…compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in backwater juke joints and dive bars from Nashville to New York City.

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[Flip] Wilson was a more troubled person than his easy and attractive onstage demeanor would suggest. But he was also a more serious and committed one, who studied comedy like a science and performed it as an art. Part of the first wave of black comedians to break the color line, he arrived during the sociocultural crack in time we call the mid-’60s. He straddled that crack for a while, and then it swallowed him.

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Should Google compensate us for our searches? Should Amazon pay us for the books we buy? They should, because they are using us to expand their databases and hone their algorithms—and, eventually, steal our jobs. This is the startling argument advanced by Jaron Lanier…

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