Cristina Alger took the “Write what you know” dictum to heart. Her book The Darlings (which has evoked comparisons to Dominick Dunne and Tom Wolfe—no shabby company for a debut novel) is set amid the world of the titular Upper East Side hedge fund family, just as the market crashes and reveals some questionable corporate 
Jamal Joseph attended a protest in Harlem the night Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Though the protest was mostly peaceful, looting and rioting broke out. Cops began clubbing and shooting at the protesters, making no differentiation between looters and those simply shouting phrases like “The King is dead.” The police chased Joseph, a 
At 51, New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen has hit the ubiquitous halfway point for age. But instead of getting older quietly, Cohen decided to write a biography of middle age in her first book, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (Scribner). She starts at the beginning, roughly a century ago, when middle 
Judging from her hilariously dark new memoir Agorafabulous!: Dispatches from My Bedroom (out Feb. 14 from William Morrow), Sara Benincasa will always win the “Who has it worse?” game. Spent a week during college in your apartment, unable to get dressed or leave? Benincasa could barely leave her bed, and took to pissing in cereal bowls rather 
About two hours after the Tyson-Lewis fight, after the arena had cleared out, after the final press conference, after 20,000 people had collectively shot some kind of cathartic wad of soul-semen and soul-pussy-juice, I found an exit and walked alone across a large, desolate parking lot and up a steep grass embankment. As usual I 
There is a lot of ground covered in Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes, from the Great Disappointment of the 19th century to a time when computers were the province of dedicated insomniacs obsessed with the idea of making the machines do their bidding. Beneath the divergences and skittering chronology, however, is a fairly banal search for 
