Category: Culture
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Good Neighbors
There goes the neighborhood. Set in a town on Long Island not unlike the one where she grew up. Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors, an Amazon Best of February Pick, is formatted like a sociological study exploring a crime that happened in the past. “My roots are in horror and I thought about making this a…
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Hour of the Witch
“Hour of the Witch,” Chris Bohjalian’s well-researched and chilling new novel, takes us into a past where, just by trying to exercise her independence and desire to lead her own life, a woman could be castigated as a witch.
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Mark Bittman: Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
Mark Bittman never does anything in a small way. His cookbooks typically run some 600 pages and have titles like “The Best Recipes in the World,” and his ten-book “How to Cook” series such as “How to Cook Everything Fast,” “How to Bake Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” They’re so pack full of…
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Chicago Writer Takes Us Back to the Gilded Age in New Novel
Chicago author Renee Rosen is again taking us on a trip to the past. In her previous novels, she’s explored the city’s jazz roots (Windy City Blues), the Chicago Fire and the founding of the city’s iconic department stores (What the Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age), and Prohibition-era…
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THE 17TH ANNUAL BEST BOOK AWARDS ANNOUNCE 2020 AWARD RECIPIENTS
American Book Fest has announced the winners and finalists of The 2020 Best Book Awards. Awards were presented for titles published in 2018-2020. Jeffrey Keen, President and CEO of American Book Fest said this year’s contest yielded over 2,000 entries from mainstream and independent publishers. These were then narrowed down to over 400 winners and finalists in 90…
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THE 17TH ANNUAL BEST BOOK AWARDS ANNOUNCE 2020 AWARD RECIPIENTS
Mainstream & Independent Titles Score Top Honors in the 17th Annual Best Book Awards HarperCollins, Penguin/Random House, John Wiley and Sons, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, Forge, Sterling Publishing, Hay House, Sounds True, Llewellyn Worldwide, NYU Press, Oxford University Press, John Hopkins University Press, The White House Historical Association and hundreds of Independent Houses contribute to this…
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Laziness Does Not Exist: Drilling Down on Procrastination
“This isn’t getting the work of the world done,” my mother used to tell me when I was young and talking on the phone to friends instead of cleaning my room or putting away the dishes or whatever else needed to be done. I still don’t know exactly what the work of the world…
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Thriller writer channels anger into her books
Fargo, vice president of the Chicagoland chapter of Sisters in Crime and the cocreator of the podcast Unlikeable Female Characters, has a little bad girl in her too. “I love the sinister title of ‘They Never Learn,’” she said, adding that this, her second thriller, has everything she loves in a book — sexy women,…
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TMI: My Life in Scandal by Perez Hilton
The phone call from Perez Hilton came two days earlier than planned. “He can do it now instead,” his assistant emailed me on Wednesday. I was totally unprepared. Hilton’s autobiography, “TMI: My Life in Scandal” (Chicago Review Press) — the one we’re supposed to talk about — sat unread on my desk. Thinking “right now”…
Shelf Life 