February 20, 2012 How much do we read into ourselves when we write a diary? Author Patrick DeWitt recommends the dark, deep journal of a man suffering from a nervous breakdown.

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February 20, 2012 Krys Lee's short stories explore brutal, fracturing families with political and feminist overtones. Critic Heller McAlpin says to read this book twice — if you can bear to.

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February 20, 2012 There's a new, towering tribute to the 16th president in the nation's capitol: A three-story sculpture of 7,000 books written about the 16th president. The sculpture represents less than half of the 15,000 some books written about Lincoln, says Paul Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre.

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February 20, 2012 Through his many New Yorker covers, Barry Blitt has become one of the pre-eminent satirical cartoonists of America's recent presidents. Now Blitt has trained his eye and pen upon our first president in a new children's book, George Washington's Birthday.

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February 19, 2012 You'll never suffer from writer's block as long as you've got a copy of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Prolific pulp novelist William Wallace Cook turned his fiction production methods into a wacky manual for aspiring writers. Originally published in 1928, it has just been reissued.

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February 19, 2012 Not known as a hotbed of experimentation, the world of publishing has been slow to embrace the transition from print to digital. But in New York this past week, the publishers who gathered were more interested in exploring new ideas than arguing about the death of books.

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February 19, 2012 In her new book, Peggielene Bartels describes going from secretary at the U.S. Embassy to king of a fishing village in Ghana. Dividing her time between Otuam and Washington, D.C., she straddles two cultures — and says she loves every bit of it.

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February 18, 2012 The seemingly accidental death of a troubled starlet is the catalyst for events in a new thriller that takes the reader from Dublin to New York to the Congo. "It's an exploration ... of the power dynamics that go on" between executive boardrooms and warlords, author Alan Glynn says.

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February 16, 2012 The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo may be imprisoned, but his voice will not be silenced. His recent writings and poems have been collected in No Enemies, No Hatred.

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February 15, 2012 Helen Simpson once said that when it comes to short stories, "Something's got to happen, but not too much." Her latest short story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, may seem bleak and mundane — with subjects like mortality, infidelity and climate change — but it's also bursting with British wit.

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