Nytimes book review1/12/2024 The bulk of the book, set in the resulting society of human survivalists on the icy continent tells a story of genetic experimentation that recalls H.P. The alien invasion that begins the book and prompts a desperate evacuation to Antarctica–the only place the aliens will let humans live–is bizarrely cursory, but Smith is getting it out of the way. Cold People is a zany, wildly gripping, dark futuristic fantasy that never remotely achieves plausibility but achieves escapist lift-off nonetheless. Had Smith who pivoted into TV writing with The Assassination of Gianni Versace and other shows lost his way? Nope. What is the author of a trilogy of elegant historical espionage novels (the bestselling Child 44 books) doing writing a sci-fi monster novel set in Antarctica? I read the summary of Tom Rob Smith’s Cold People (Scribner)–an alien invasion wipes out Earth’s population driving the lone survivors to Antarctica to set up a new society–with bemusement. C.S Cold People by Tom Rob Smith (February) This is a book for the SATC superfans, but it is also for anyone curious about the lived experience of downtons culture in the 70s, 80s, and beyond. You didn’t need to have a lot of retail experience to work for Patricia Field, it seems, but you did need to have a whole lot of the right kind of attitude. But it also covers her more tender years growing up in New York City and Long Island, how her early store, Pants Pub, ignited a small revolution in downtown fashion, and how subsequent boutiques became a refuge for fantastic misfits of all stripes. Patricia Field’s memoir covers the territory you’d expect it to cover: how she got her gig as the costume designer for Sex In the City (including a charming anecdote about how she convinced showrunner Darren Star that a tutu was far superior to a shift dress for Carrie’s ensemble in the opening credits), her more recent exploits as the force behind the eyeball-scorching outfits on Emily In Paris. –Taylor Antrim Sam by Allegra Goodman (January) His gothic predilections are not for everyone (the Trawler’s kills are grotesque) but the evocation of a certain kind of vacant privilege-a buried longing overlaid with studied dissociation-is masterful. Ellis holds nothing back through these 600 pages: baroque violence, startling eroticism, relentless cataloging of mood-specific song and movie titles. It stars none other than Ellis himself, a prep school senior writing a novel called Less Than Zero and surrounded by a pack of rich beautiful friends who are themselves shadowed by a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler. The Shards, Ellis’s hypnotic, prodigious and unsettling new novel-his first in 13 years-is a time machine back to that early 80s milieu. Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, published in 1985, is hard to shake-a drifting, menacing story about Los Angeles private school kids with monosyllabic names (Clay, Blair, Trent, Rip) who go to parties, do drugs, have sex and try to feel something about any of it. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.” The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020 when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained, “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over following year. Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle, The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood Youth Dependency, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist. The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This, while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were. Du Bois, which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year, with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.
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