New york times biographies
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Literary Biographies
Following are literary biographies reviewed by The New York Times Book Review since Dec. 31, 2000.
Alice Walker: A LifeBy EVELYN C. WHITE
Evelyn C. White traces the writer's life from her days as the child of Georgia sharecroppers to the international triumph of "The Color Purple."
Allen Tate: Orphan of the South
By THOMAS A. UNDERWOOD
A biography of the critic Allen Tate focuses on his Southern aesthetics.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
By MIRANDA CARTER
Miranda Carter has written a biography of the enigmatic art historian who was surveyor of Britain's royal pictures and a secret Soviet spy.
Anthony Powell: A Life
By MICHAEL BARBER
The first full-length life of Powell is chatty and jokey in a manner peculiar to British biographers.
The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara
By GEOFFREY WOLFF
Geoffrey Wolff looks past John O'Hara's reputation as an ogre to get to the writer who shook up 20th-century fict
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The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Ranked list in the New York Times
The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century is a ranked list of the 100 best novels published in the English language since January 1, 2000.
Selection criteria
[edit]The list was compiled bygd a team of critics and editors at The New York Times and, with the input of 503 writers and academics, assessed the books based on their impact, originality, and lasting influence. The selection includes novels, memoirs, history books, and other nonfiction works from various genres, representing well-known and emerging authors.[1]
The following are a few of the individuals who contributed to the list.
Authors (fiction)
Stephen King
Min Jin Lee
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Bonnie Garmus
Curtis Sittenfeld
R. L. Stine
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Junot Díaz
Anthony Doerr
James Patterson
Stephen Graham Jones
Elin Hilderbrand
Jason Reynolds
Rebecca Roanhorse
Marlon James
Jonathan Lethe
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Fierce Attachments
“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”
When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait o