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      2 Unexpected Books for Spooky Season

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      A haunted author; haunted dolls.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesDear readers,I don’t require a dedicated ghost-story season. To me, that would be like loving people only on Feb. 14, or pretending canned tomatoes don’t exist. Besides, as I understand it, ghosts don’t work on schedule.But in case you’re stricter than the undead and I, here are two less explicit examples of the uncanny that take the definition of “haunting” and bend it like the sad, stale Laffy Taffy at the bottom of your trick-or-treat pumpkin. Of course, they can be read at any time of year — in costume, if you see fit.—Sadie“I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys,” by Miranda SeymourNonfiction, 2022For the past few months, this terrific biography of Jean Rhys has been my insomnia companion: a substantive piece of nonfiction to dip into when I wake up at 2 a.m. and only an hour’s reading will put me back to sleep. (Unlike Sally Rooney, I love biographies of writers.) Yet it’s anything but lulling — rather, it feels like the kind of book whose charms are thrown into relief by the privacy of sleeplessness.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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      Historical Fiction Books to Read Next

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      In the hands of skilled novelists, the stories of an heiress, a prime minister and a literary mystery woman are brought to life.There’s plenty of historical drama in Robert Harris’s latest novel, but the events that led Britain into the carnage of World War I serve mainly as a backdrop for the intimate maneuverings in PRECIPICE (Harper, 464 pp., $30). At its center is the actual clandestine liaison between the country’s 61-year-old prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and a 26-year-old aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, who became his sounding board and confidante as he faced mounting hostilities both within his government and throughout Europe.Harris notes at the outset that all the letters from Asquith quoted in his text are authentic documents. Around them Harris has deftly sketched his own portrayals of Asquith, Stanley and their social circle, adding invented correspondence from Stanley to Asquith as well as an invented Special Branch detective who finds himself deep in an “off the books” investigation after copies of classified Foreign Office telegrams — meant to be distributed only to a few select ministers — start turning up in decidedly insecure locations. Going undercover at the Stanleys’ Welsh estate, then covertly reading Venetia’s mail, he becomes an increasingly uncomfortable voyeur, disturbed by the Asquith letters’ “bizarre mixture of secret military intelligence and passionate declarations of love.” Will he be tempted to intervene? Or will Venetia, sensing the danger of her position, take action on her own?Independence is the double-edged sword of Peggy Guggenheim’s existence: seemingly granted by her inherited fortune but denied by the expectations surrounding the Guggenheim name and her own insecurities. At least that’s the impression you get from PEGGY (Random House, 384 pp., $29), a sympathetic first-person narrative left unfinished at her death in 2022 by Rebecca Godfrey and completed by her friend Leslie Jamison.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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      Trump Secretly Stayed in Touch With Putin After Leaving Office, Book Says

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has secretly spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders, according to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.The book, titled “War” and scheduled to be published next week, describes a scene in early 2024 at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, when the former president ordered an aide out of his office so he could conduct a phone call with Mr. Putin. The unidentified aide said the two may have spoken a half-dozen other times as well since Mr. Trump left the White House.The book also reports that Mr. Trump, while still in office early during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Mr. Putin what were then rare tests for the virus for the Russian’s personal use. Mr. Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, urged Mr. Trump to not publicly reveal the gesture because it could damage the American president politically. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Mr. Putin reportedly told him.The disclosures raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Putin just weeks before an election that will determine whether the former president will reclaim the White House. A copy of the book was obtained by The New York Times. The Washington Post, where Mr. Woodward has worked for more than half a century, and CNN, where he often appears as a commentator, also reported on the book on Tuesday.Mr. Trump’s campaign dismissed Mr. Woodward’s book by assailing the author with typically personal insults — “a total sleazebag,” “slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality” — without addressing any of the specifics reported in it.“None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Steven Cheung, the campaign communications director, said in the statement. Mr. Cheung said Mr. Trump did not give Mr. Woodward access for the book and noted that the former president was suing the author over a previous book.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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      Lore Segal, Mordant Memoirist of Émigré Life, Dies at 96

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      One of thousands of Jewish children transported to England at the dawn of World War II, she explored themes of displacement with penetrating wit in novel-memoirs like “Other People’s Houses.”Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.Her daughter Beatrice Segal announced her death.On Dec. 10, 1938, 500 Jewish children boarded a train in Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport, as it was known, that would deliver them from Nazi-occupied territory to foster families in England. Ms. Segal, age 10, was registered as No. 152, the pampered only child of comfortably middle-class parents.She would go on to live with four families in seven years, including a pair of pious, garden-and-house-proud sisters straight out of a Barbara Pym novel whose influence would make Ms. Segal, as she wrote later, a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.The writer at age 11. A year earlier, she was one of 500 Jewish children sent to Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport.via Segal familyHer parents followed her there in 1939, entering the country on domestic servant visas, which was the only route available to them. Her mother, a skilled homemaker, would rise to accept that role. But it would break her father, a former accountant, who died after a series of strokes.Ms. Segal, with the adaptability and callousness of youth, along with her innate sense of the absurd and the detachment of a born writer, fared better. After settling in New York, she found her métier by telling tales of her exile.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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      Can You Guess These Novels That Were Made Into Broadway Musical Flops?

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on popular books that had less than successful adaptations into Broadway musicals.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie adaptations.4 of 5“The Red Shoes,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 dark fairy tale about enchanted footwear, has inspired film, theater and ballet productions — as well as a Kate Bush album, a South Korean horror movie and other adaptations. In 2006, a jukebox musical that blended the story with the songs of Earth, Wind & Fire opened and closed on Broadway in just a few months. What was the name of the musical? More

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      Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92

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      Once called “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths.Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, died on Saturday in Warwick, England. He was 92.His death, in a care home, was confirmed on Sunday by his daughter Sara Caldwell to The Associated Press. Ms. Caldwell, an author and filmmaker, did not give a cause but said his health had been declining recently.Mr. Coover’s first novel, “The Origin of the Brunists,” published in 1966 and fairly traditional in its telling, was about a religious cult built around the lone survivor of a mining accident in the Midwest.In The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott wrote of its author: “If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis.”If it wasn’t obvious then that Mr. Coover had no interest in inheriting the kingdom of social realism from Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, his 1969 story collection “Pricksongs and Descants” made it abundantly clear. Those stories firmly established his career-long interest in remixing fairy tales, exploding myths and placing only the most transparent window in front of fiction’s inner machinery.“The Babysitter,” a widely anthologized story from that collection, rifled through the many possible scenarios of one night after a young woman arrives at a house to take care of three children. The brief, fractured episodes range from the banal to the violent and the lascivious, including the fantasies of the babysitter’s boyfriend and of the children’s father. (More than 25 years later the story was, improbably, adapted into a movie with the same title starring Alicia Silverstone.)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 About Old Flames

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      Stephen McCauley’s novel about ex-spouses reuniting, in a sense; Jim Shepard’s noir about a fateful hit-and-run.Twenty47studio/Getty ImagesDear readers,I pulled an old favorite novel from the shelf recently, and a ghost fell out. Not an actual ectoplasm but a small cream-colored card, the lost artifact of a summer fling with a glamorous Spaniard whose chaotic charms were never meant to last past August. (Reader, I ended it at a busy crosswalk and was on the subway back to Brooklyn before the next light changed: over, as they say, in a New York minute.)Perhaps you are a better caretaker of your personal library — and your seasonal romances gone by — than I. But any fan of stoop sales and secondhand bookshops knows what it is to pick up a novel riddled with hand-drawn margin notes or ancient A.T.M. receipts, all the impenetrable detritus of some stranger’s lived-in life.Most times, that kind of mess will at least net you a modest discount. There can also be something magical, though, about these bits of literary flotsam: a whole world of small mysteries and secret histories contained in a scrawled title-page dedication or a cryptic doodle.And there’s an enduring lure, too, in revisiting a long-ago love affair, as the main characters in this week’s newsletter picks do. Whether that’s strictly advisable, mis amores, is another story.—LeahWe 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