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      Find the 13 Book Titles Hidden in This Text Puzzle

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      Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica.Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica.Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica. More

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      Barbara Taylor Bradford, ‘A Woman of Substance’ Novelist, Dies at 91

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      Her own rags-to-riches story mirrored those of many of her heroines, and her dozens of books helped her amass a fortune of $300 million.Barbara Taylor Bradford, one of the world’s best-selling romance novelists, who captivated readers for decades with chronicles of buried secrets, raging ambitions and strong women of humble origins rising to wealth and power, died on Sunday. She was 91.She died after a short illness, her publisher, HarperCollins, said on Monday. No other details were provided.Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.She was born in England into a working-class family whose grit inspired some of her stories. Her father lost a leg in World War I, her mother was born out of wedlock, and her grandmother once labored in a workhouse for the poor. She quit school at 15, became a journalist, married an American film producer and lived for 60 years in New York. She was a self-taught novelist, publishing her first when she was 46.Exploiting exotic locales and an arsenal of steamy liaisons, mysterious deaths and feasts of betrayal and scandal, Ms. Bradford spun tales of love and revenge, infidelity and heartbreak that lofted resolute women into glittering lives with handsome men, mansions in London or Manhattan and the board rooms of global corporations. Empires were born in her pages, and sequels turned into dynasties.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donate This Holiday Season: Women and Children Need Your Help

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      This column is part of Times Opinion’s 2024 Giving Guide. Read more about the guide in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.Forget the necktie that will sit in Dad’s closet or the perfume that your sister Sue will soon regift, for I have some better ideas.This is my annual holiday giving guide, and I think you’ll like the charities I recommend this year — and so will Dad and Sue if you contribute in their names. You can donate and find out more information through my Kristof Holiday Impact Prize website, KristofImpact.org, which I’ve used for the past six years to support nonprofits in my giving guide.Here’s what your contributions can accomplish this year:Give a woman her life back! One of the most heartbreaking conditions I’ve reported on is obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that happens in poor countries when a woman endures many hours of obstructed labor and no doctor is available to perform a C-section. The baby usually dies, and the woman is left with injuries affecting the vaginal wall and the bladder or rectum, so she continuously leaks bodily waste.These women — sometimes just teenage girls — can feel stigmatized and humiliated, even that they have been cursed by God.The good news is that together we can help them reclaim their lives, with a corrective surgery that costs just $619 per person. A nonprofit called the Fistula Foundation has financed more than 100,000 surgeries through a network of more than 150 hospitals in more than 30 countries. Yet need remains enormous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Books for Readers Who Don’t Care About Polite Company

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      A Japanese tale of “frustrated love and revenge,” and a visual history of bathrooms.Yana Paskova for The New York TimesDear readers,“Never judge a book by its contents,” quipped a wag in a porkpie hat as we both regarded the cover of an aging paperback guide to vitamins, for sale on a Broadway sidewalk. I smiled politely; I found the remark asinine; I resolved to work it into conversation as soon as possible.The following two finds are books I picked up on the basis of their flap copy — and might not have otherwise. I debated writing about both of them.—Sadie“Forbidden Colors,” by Yukio MishimaFiction, 1951“‘Forbidden Colors’ is a moving tale of frustrated love and revenge,” the flap tells readers. “Drawn to homosexuality after a loveless marriage, Yuichi is locked into the powerful grasp of an aging writer who uses him for revenge on the women who have wronged him. Yuichi’s own search for love takes him through the bleak, demoralized streets of postwar Japan, through parks of assignation, gay bars and parties, and into the lives of fallen aristocrats, black marketeers and male prostitutes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Merkel Memoir Recalls What It Was Like Dealing With Trump and Putin

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      The new book by former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany also aims to justify decisions she made that are still affecting her country and the rest of Europe.Shortly after Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s chancellor, visited Washington. As the world looked on, the two leaders sat in front of an unlit fireplace, awkwardly and silently waiting for the photographers to do their work.After hearing the photographers demand “handshake, handshake,” an urging that Mr. Trump ignored, Ms. Merkel tried herself, she relates in a new memoir. “They want to have a handshake,” she said in a hushed tone audible to the press corps just feet away.“As soon as I said that, I shook my head mentally at myself,” Ms. Merkel wrote, according to excerpts from the memoir released this week in Die Zeit, the German weekly. “How could I forget that Trump knew exactly what effect he wanted to achieve?” she added.Long-anticipated in Germany, the book, “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” promises the inside story of the taciturn woman many saw as the defender of a global liberal order. When the world was shocked by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the first election of Mr. Trump and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ms. Merkel exuded a kind of patient, cerebral calm that was widely seen as the bastion of an old, more predictable world order.Since she stepped down in 2021, things have changed drastically. Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Germany to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Absorbing both the lack of cheap energy and a reduction of the Chinese export market, the German economy has stagnated. The country’s bridges, roads and railways, long neglected, are falling apart. And Ms. Merkel’s welcoming migration policy has led to a surge in the far right.All of which has led to widespread unhappiness and a rethinking of Ms. Merkel’s legacy.Ms. Merkel’s book, which is also being published in an English translation and hits bookstores on Tuesday, is expected to be more than just a fascinating first-person view from the seat of a great European power. It is also a justification for decisions she made that helped lead Germany and the rest of Europe to a perilous place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea,’ by Elias Khoury

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      Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” series continues with a young man switching identities in a society seeking to erase him.CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO: Star of the Sea, by Elias Khoury. Translated by Humphrey Davies.“The beginning of life was the massacre and I have to gather together the scraps of its stories.”The speaker here is Adam Dannoun, the hero of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s final work, the epic trilogy “Children of the Ghetto.” (Khoury died at 76 in Beirut on Sept. 15, shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.)Adam, who was a small child in the first volume, “My Name Is Adam” (2019), now appears as a teenager and young man in the second novel, “Star of the Sea.” The massacre Adam is referring to took place in 1948, inside what is now Israel. But this event is impossible to separate from today’s massacres in Gaza, or from the other crises — the mass expulsions, land thefts, imprisonment, historical appropriation and erasure — that constitute what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of their existence under occupation and in exile. The massacre is also, Khoury insists, impossible to separate from the Holocaust, the pogroms and the history of Jewish suffering that led to the creation of Israel.“Catastrophes,” Adam says bitterly, reflecting on his own experience within this hall of mirrors, “however tragic they may be, liberate their victims from the truth and drive them to find a justification for everything.”Adam has no choice about his own “liberation.” The son of a fallen resistance fighter, Hasan Dannoun, he’s rescued as a baby from the arms of his dead mother during the expulsion of Palestinians from the town of Lydda, in July 1948. He grows up with a foster mother, Manal, among the few Palestinians allowed to remain in a tiny quarter of the town, a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire.Seven years later, Manal marries an abusive man who takes them to live a safer, if still impoverished, life in an Arab enclave in Haifa. As soon as he’s able, Adam escapes the home, and immediately encounters a strange new reality. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, he can effortlessly pass as a Jewish Israeli. In nearly every way, it’s easier for him to become one.“Children of the Ghetto” is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with “Passing” and “Invisible Man.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Novels That Could Almost Be Diaries

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      Barry Gifford’s bohemian scrapbook; Elizabeth McCracken’s eulogy for a mother.Peter Stevenson for The New York TimesDear readers,Apparently, I was one of the last to learn that they don’t teach cursive anymore, at least not in New York City public schools. Maybe I am silly to mourn it; like milkmen and landlines, some things naturally see themselves out.Even my own longhand tends to cramp now when I try to write anything more substantial than a grocery list, the weakling muscles of a lost habit turning my words sloppy and serial killer-ish. (Beloved birthday-card recipients, please believe me! It’s an expression of love, not a ransom note.)Still, I miss the intimacy of analog communication; the low-stakes thrill of a voice unfiltered by Times New Roman or (sigh) Comic Sans. And the two selections in this week’s newsletter, while typeset like any other respectable novel, feel like book-length letters to me: chatty, confiding and charmingly digressive, like dispatches from an inordinately smart and waggish pen pal.—Leah“Landscape With Traveler,” by Barry GiffordFiction, 1980We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Lazarus Man,’ by Richard Price

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      “Lazarus Man” follows several characters in Harlem in the wake of a building collapse.LAZARUS MAN, by Richard PriceWe first meet Anthony Carter in a barroom, and the first thing he does is tell a lie. “I went there too,” he says to a woman he’s vaguely interested in picking up, referring to her Fordham Rams sweatshirt.The gambit goes nowhere — the woman borrowed the shirt from her cousin — and anyway Anthony never went to Fordham but to Columbia, where he was kicked out after a few months for dealing drugs. The expulsion was a waste, since he didn’t need the money. But it is the first of a long string of disappointments that have brought Anthony, now in his 40s, unemployed and separated from his wife and stepdaughter, to this bar on Lenox and 123rd in Manhattan because “it was one of those nights,” as the book’s first line has it.After tying one on at the bar, Anthony stops at a second-floor church where he is entranced and repulsed by a charismatic female preacher: “HE CAME IN BECAUSE HE HEARD THE NOISE, GOD.” He goes home and to bed, with a job interview for a retail position the next day.Anthony is one of four central characters Richard Price follows in his 10th novel, “Lazarus Man,” a book difficult to categorize because its tone and action are neither comic nor tragic. Unlike previous Price novels, it’s not a police procedural, though there is a detective looking for a missing person. A specific place and a broad sociological interest in its residents tie the book together, as do the Lower East Side in Price’s “Lush Life” (2008) and the fictionalized Jersey City (called Dempsey) in “Clockers” (1992) and other novels.In the Harlem of “Lazarus Man” it is the spring of 2008, a temporal interzone before the catastrophe of the financial crisis, the political ascent of Barack Obama (mentioned only once, near the end) and the advent of the smartphone. You might say, “It was one of those years.”The novel’s unifying event is the collapse of a tenement building that kills six residents and draws its protagonists to the smoldering rubble. Detective Mary Roe is among the police officers who report to the scene to account for the dead, the survivors and the missing. Felix Pearl hears the early-morning noise from around the corner and shows up with his camera. He’s a young man with an obsessive vocation as a photographer but only hazy notions of how to make a living at it, and how and why to become an artist: He at least knows he should be looking for the action. Royal Davis, a funeral director, is looking for clients because business has hit a rough patch, so he sends his young son Marquise to the collapse site to hand out business cards to the possibly bereaved.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More