Irina Reyn
By Irina Reyn
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn’t as Bad as You Think Arrival
Not since Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” have I been as moved by a science fiction film as I was by Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.” What both films understand so well is that our urge to communicate with extraterrestrial life is actually about processing the mystery of life and death, loss and love. Amy Adams is haunting as…
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Culture Why My Grandfather Voted For Trump (Or Did He?)
When my mother told me that my 93-year-old grandfather would be voting for Hillary Clinton, I was thrilled. Russian Jewish immigrants of a certain age tend to vote for Republican candidates for a variety of reasons, and it gave me great pleasure that he and I were united on this election. I always admired how…
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Culture A Portrait of the Con Artist as Albanian-American
MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.99 Francine Prose’s light-hearted new novel, “My New American Life,” could be renamed “A Portrait of the Con Artist as a Young Immigrant.” In this case, the artist of sorts in question is Lula, and she is a weaver of tales, a woman making sense…
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Culture There’s Not No Place Like Home
The Free World By David Bezmozgis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages, $26 In his appreciation of the film “The Wizard of Oz,” Salman Rushdie wrote, “The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of…
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Culture 21st Century Mann
The Escape By Adam Thirlwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25 ‘No one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap.” So asserts the wily and knowing narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s at once brilliant…
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Culture Burning the Ones You Love
The Archivist’s Story By Travis Holland The Dial Press, 256 pages, $23. How does a lover of great literature survive in an era in which writers are persecuted and manuscripts are burned? And what if that same person were forced to destroy the manuscripts of the great writers he venerates? This is the dilemma faced…
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Culture An Eastern European ‘Exodus’
A Day of Small Beginnings By Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum Little, Brown and Company, 384 pages, $24.99. ‘I think our ghosts are everywhere, all the time,” a young Polish man tells a visiting American Jew in Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum’s deeply heartfelt first novel. “The past does not leave us. And we do not leave the past.”…
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Culture Haunted by the Ghosts of Traumas Past
Blue Nude By Elizabeth Rosner Ballantine Books, 224 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘In retrospect, I can see that I spent much of my childhood waiting for the war,” Eva Hoffman wrote in “After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins” (PublicAffairs, 2004), her renowned investigation of the trauma of second-generation…
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