Plus new pieces from our critics.
 | | Joan Didion was an avid cultural observer whose writing blended aloof glamour and vulnerability.Mary Lloyd Estrin, Everett Collection Historical, via Alamy |
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Here's your weekly catch-up on everything you need to know going on in the book world. |
- Joan Didion, who shaped decades of fiction and journalism with her trenchant observations about American culture and disorder, died last week at 87. For the longtime fans or new readers alike, here is a guide to her best-known books. (Didion was also a prolific contributor to The Times, writing profiles, reviews and essays.)
- Our former book critic Parul Sehgal wrote an appraisal of Didion's career. "She was a writer preoccupied with, and troubled by, mythos — of youth, of America's founding, of social movements, of the '60s — and preternaturally gifted at fashioning her own."
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- Dwight Garner reviews "Brown Girls," a "brash and talky" debut novel by Daphne Palasi Andreades centered on a group of friends from Queens. "Andreades's writing has economy and freshness. 'Brown Girls' reads as much like poetry as it does like a novel," he writes.
- And in an essay, Molly Young writes about Stoicism, from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius to modern proponents of the philosophy who "present it as a strategy for living a meaningful secular existence, as though Stoicism might be swapped in for religion like Lactaid for regular milk."
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That's all for now. Please stay in touch and let me know what you think — whether it's about this newsletter, our reviews, our podcast, our literary calendar, our Instagram or what you're reading. We on the Books desk read all of it, and I'll make every effort to write back. You can reach me at books@nytimes.com. |
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