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Writing as compensation for the things we don’t do

Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It coasts into and out of asides about the consolations and difficulties of writing, about the many books he started, or thought about starting, on his travels but didn’t finish. “Whenever a publisher asks me what I’m going to do next,” he told John Crace a couple years ago, . . .

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Memory, recrimination, hope in Böll’s Billiards

Sam Sacks admires Heinrich Böll’s “daringly and hypnotically written” novel about a renowned architect who sees his very success as a kind of complicity with the Nazis. If that’s not enticement enough, Jessa wrote the introduction to the reissue.

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Remarkable delineations of the quotidian

“Again and again progress is offset by brutality and the threat of much worse.” Suzanne Berne praises my friend Robb Forman Dew’s Being Polite to Hitler in the Times. Read it back-to-back with Dew favorite Christina Stead.

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