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… Alistair McCartney spent his youth obsessed with his favorite encyclopedia set, and he has returned to it, as if he’s been haunted by it all these years. It’s a strange, intriguing narrative, mixing fact and fiction, the banal with the apocalyptic, and the nostalgic with the bizarre.

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Bennett’s omniscient narrator shows us the internal changes that give rise to the Queen’s newly broadened perspective. … And so we witness from an omniscient perspective the Queen’s transformation …

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WHEN CHRIS KNIGHT was thirteen years old, his beloved father died. It appears there was no love lost between his parents: as soon as the funeral was safely over, his mother flew through the house, gathering all of her husband’s belongings. She put them in trash bags, hoping to wipe Bill Knight from her own memory and from that of her children.

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“THERE IS no such thing,” Robert Leleux’s boisterous Texas mother, Jessica Wilson, once told him, “as a happy medium.” With a funny, hyper-campy yet rarely sentimental prose style, Leleux has written a tale about coming out in small-town America and his family’s made-for-TV foibles.

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A FROTHY COMEDY of parlor-room etiquette and sexual wish fulfillment, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander is the bizarro cousin of a Jane Austen novel, in which Regency manners and nuptial expectations are turned inside out. Ann Herendeen’s novel is a lively romp in which girl meets boy, boy meets boy, and everyone falls in love and lives happily ever after.

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The Stone Gods exemplifies what has come to be known as the eco-millenarian novel. In this case, Winterson cross-pollinates Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with Nietzsche’s theory of “eternal recurrence,” a little Orwell, and a dash of quantum physics, to tell the cosmic odyssey of the renegade Sapphic scientist, Billie Crusoe and of her love for Spike, a sexy female robo-sapiens …

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JOSEPH A. MASSAD, an associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, does not shy from controversy. His departmental home page provides his response to an ad hoc grievance committee report that investigated allegations he intimidated students who disagreed with his political views on Israel. Massad turns the tables and accuses his detractors of a persistent witch-hunt.

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… James Davidson is famous for his fascinating study of Greek culinary pleasures (Courtesans and Fishcakes, 1998), and many scholars (including himself) expected him to provide the new paradigm on Greek homosexuality. Instead, he has refurbished a Victorian model: Greek love was not all about boys and sex; it was all about couples and romance. …

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THIS NEW BOOK of readings assembles eight autobiographical narratives written by late 19th- and early 20th-century Frenchmen (and one Italian) who were attracted to men, providing readable translations and just enough footnotes to answer obvious questions without slowing down the reading.

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