Jean Zimmerman
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Zhou Haohui's high-octane cop drama Death Notice aims for Dragon Tattoo-type thrills, but gets dragged down by flat characterizations and odd romantic flourishes.
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Both terrifying and wonderful, Barracoon is Zora Neale Hurston's long-unpublished account of her conversations with Cudjo Lewis, who was brought to America on the last trans-Atlantic slave ship.
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Gilbert King returns to Lake County, Fla., in his new book, which tells the tangled story of a rape accusation, a racist sheriff, and a mentally disabled white man railroaded and stuck in an asylum.
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Damian Dibben's novel follows a 217-year-old dog (yes, you read that right) as he searches for his wizardly master, who's disappeared somewhere in Europe in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars.
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Elaine Weiss's new book reminds us how near a thing women's suffrage was — it all rode on one yes vote in the Tennessee legislature, cast by a man who changed his mind after pressure from his mother.
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Kim Fu's new novel about a sleepaway camp sojourn that turns shattering for five young girls. But though the troubles seem tame — thirst and a lack of gummi bears — the horror comes later.
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A century ago, Hollywood had no stars. Movies were silent and the actors were anonymous. Melanie Benjamin's new novel outlines how actress Mary Pickford and writer Frances Marion changed that.
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In Chloe Benjamin's new book, four siblings growing up on the Lower East Side amid the upheavals of the 1960s gain forbidden, life-changing knowledge: The exact year and date of their deaths.
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This season's secret weapon in literary banter will be Mrs. Caliban, a peculiar, wonderful, overlooked 1983 novella by Rachel Ingalls, about a housewife whose life is upended by a suave frog monster.
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Author John Banville makes a valiant imaginative leap with Mrs. Osmond, his attempt to craft a new ending for the heroine of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, but he doesn't quite land it.