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Closing Time
by Rich Cohen
With the steep decline of the American auto industry, has the car salesman become like the cowboy c. 1910, at the closing of the frontier?

My Father’s Murder
by Stephen Elliott
An attempt to assemble the truth from pulp novels, old photographs, nonexistent police reports, and memories of violence.

Dark Family
by Sara Gran and Megan Abbott
A reconsideration of V. C. Andrews’s much-maligned, utterly strange quasi children’s literature.

Childeish Ideas
by J.T. Thomas
On the grand ideas and strange habits of one of the most influential, brilliant, and iconoclastic archaeologists of the twentieth century.

Carving the Whale
by Damion Searls
Rescuing the digression, texture, and weirdness from a well-meaning abridgement of Moby-Dick.

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Rebecca Solnit
interviewed by Benjamin Cohen
“How can you write about the obscure things that give you pleasure with a style flexible enough to come to more urgent matters?”

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Philip Zimbardo
interviewed by Tamler Sommers
The man who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment considers its implications for ethics, free will, and Abu Ghraib.

Nick Cave
interviewed by Tony DuShane
The songwriter has kicked heroin, written a new novel, and is scoring the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Brad Neely
micro-interviewed by Ken Burns (sort of)

Sedaratives
by Anne Beatts

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

The Deathbed Version: A new poem
by Scott Zieher

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Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier
reviewed by Laird Hunt

Robert Minhinnick’s King Driftwood
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Oscar Casares’s Amigoland
reviewed by Francesca Mari

Jan Kjærstad’s The Discoverer
reviewed by Lara Tupper

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Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli
reviewed by Kate Zambreno

Creative Accounting: Commissioned Play
by Christopher Benz

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Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

A Revisionist History of Teeth
by Richard Brouwer

Schema: A Classification of Shaggy-Dog Jokes
by Jude Stewart