The Best Books of 2018
150 of this year's top titles—100 for adults and 50 for kids and teens. more...Yasmine Seale Has Retranslated ‘Aladdin’
Seale’s new translation of the classic tale reveals its surprising depth. more...Karl Ove Knausgaard: His Life as a Novel
Knausgaard discusses the ending of his relentlessly confessional 3,600-page series, My Struggle. more...and more.
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Profiles
Liza Wieland Takes a Master Poet to Paris
Wieland’s novel 'Paris, 7 A.M.' centers on Elizabeth Bishop’s stay in Paris in 1937, when the poet’s journals abruptly break off.
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Interviews
A Near-Future History Lesson: PW Talks with Agnes Gomillion
In 'The Record Keeper' (Titan, June), set in a racially stratified near-future America, a woman coopted into the repression of her people pivots to leading a rebellion.
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Interviews
The Business of Eating: PW Talks with Ed Levine
In 'Serious Eater' (Portfolio, June), food writer and entrepreneur Levine shares his story of launching 'Serious Eats.'
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Interviews
A Tale of Three Charleses: PW Talks with Tim Mason
In 'The Darwin Affair' (Alongquin, June), Mason imagines a connection between an attempt on Queen Victoria’s life and Charles Darwin’s 'On the Origin of Species.'
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Profiles
Jared Diamond's New Book Pinpoints the Crisis of Our Times
Jared Diamond examines how political issues exacerbate many of the world’s problems in 'Upheaval.'
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Interviews
Rules of the Game: PW Talks with James Trefil
In 'Imagined Life' (Smithsonian, Sept.), science writer Trefil and his coauthor, Michael Summers, explore the possibilities awaiting humanity in the search for extraterrestrial life.
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Interviews
An Inconceivable Friendship: PW Talks with Daniela Petrova
In Petrova’s debut, 'Her Daughter’s Mother' (Putnam, June), pregnant Lana Stone befriends her anonymous egg donor, who suddenly vanishes.
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Interviews
A Deadly Anniversary: PW Talks with Tom O’Neill
In 'Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties' (Little, Brown, June), O’Neill challenges the accepted narrative about the Tate/LaBianca murders 50 years ago.
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Interviews
Order a Case of Kleenex and Write the Goddamn Book: PW Talks with Walt Odets
Odets’s 'Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) takes an expansive, heartfelt look at gay male identity and experience.
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Interviews
Home in South Africa: PW Talks with Bianca Marais
Marais’s second novel, 'If You Want to Make God Laugh' (Putnam, July), focuses on the struggles of three women whose lives connect in surprising ways in newly postapartheid South Africa.