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      Test Yourself on the International Settings of These Novels

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      A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz celebrates cities that are significant, whether they are the primary setting or not. Even if you aren’t familiar with the books, your knowledge of world geography and history should help you. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading. More

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      Test Yourself on These Sports Books Adapted Into Films

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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 sports books that have been adapted into films within the past 25 years.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. More

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      2 Books Celebrating Happy Marriages

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      Elizabeth Alexander and John Bayley loved their partners to the end.Pekic/GettyDear readers,Marriage is like a second-grade spelling test: We shield our work while glancing around to see if a neighbor’s answers match. And I do mean work! Sharing your life with someone can be challenging, but it’s also fun and oddly liberating because you never really know how your weird union compares with anyone else’s. Eventually you learn to keep your eyes on your own paper.Unless you’re a reader. Then you’re privy to the occasional marriage memoir, in which some brave, generous, often beleaguered soul lifts the curtain on the whole operation and tells the rest of us what’s going on behind the scenes. This year has been a bonanza for voyeurs, thanks to Leslie Jamison (“Splinters”), Lyz Lenz (“This American Ex-Wife”) and Molly Roden Winter (“More”). Honorable mentions go to Maggie Smith for “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which came out last year, and “Liars” by Sarah Manguso, a novel so real-feeling it could be a body double for a true story.With one polyamorous exception, all of the above skew to the divorce end of the spectrum. This is not to say that their authors haven’t lived happily ever after; they’re doing just fine, if acknowledgments pages and Instagram posts are to be believed.But in honor of the 25th anniversary of the day I accidentally smeared car grease across my dress and had my name spelled wrong in the program — also known as my wedding day, Sept. 25, 1999 — I decided to reread two memoirs of happy marriages. These books were every bit as candid and thought-provoking and, in some ways, aspirational as I remembered.—LizPS. Both of these memoirs are really sad. Don’t read too much into it.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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      What to Know About Supreme Court Justices’ Book Deals

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      For the justices, selling books remains one of the few ways to earn income outside the court.For Supreme Court justices, books deals have become a highly lucrative way to shape the public narrative of their lives and legacies.The money brought in by those deals, one of the few ways that they can supplement their income, often far eclipses their salaries, roughly $300,000.A majority of the current justices have published books, most recently Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her memoir, “Lovely One,” which traces the arc of her family from the segregated Jim Crow South to her rise to the Supreme Court, was released this week and shot up Amazon’s best-seller list.Here’s a closer look.Which justices have written books?Six of the nine justices have written books or currently have book deals.Justice Jackson joins Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas in publishing moving accounts of their childhoods and paths to the court. Justice Sotomayor has also written several children’s books.Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has focused on the law, publishing books describing the ethical and legal issues raised by assisted suicide and euthanasia. His most recent, published this summer, is a series of stories drawn from court cases that he uses to argue that administrative overreach and the increasing number of laws have harmed ordinary Americans.Two of the newest justices — Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh — have book deals in place. Justice Barrett’s book has been described as her views about keeping personal feelings out of judicial rulings. Justice Kavanaugh’s is expected to be a legal memoir that is likely to touch on his bruising confirmation fight.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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      From School Librarian to Activist: ‘The Hate Level and the Vitriol Is Unreal’

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      Amid a surge in book bans nationwide, the librarian Amanda Jones was targeted by vicious threats. So she decided to fight back.One Sunday morning two years ago, Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian in Watson, La., woke up and saw an email on her phone that left her shaking and breathless.The expletive-laced message from a stranger accused her of being a pedophile and a groomer, and concluded with a threat: “You can’t hide. We know where you work + live. You have a LARGE target on your back,” it said. “Click … Click … see you soon!”It was part of a deluge of online threats and harassment that Jones has faced since the summer of 2022, when she was one of around 20 people to speak out against book banning during a July meeting at her local public library.A fight broke out over whether the library should remove books with content that some deemed inappropriate for children. Like many librarians across the country, Jones found herself caught in a vicious battle over which books belong in libraries — a debate that has divided communities and school boards as book bans have surged in the United States.But the attacks on Jones have been particularly intense, and unrelenting, because of her response: She fought back.After commenters on social media accused her of seeking to sexualize children, Jones filed a defamation lawsuit against two men and the organization Citizens for a New Louisiana, a group that has pushed to have books that they consider erotic or sexual removed from the children’s section of libraries. She co-founded Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, which lobbies against legislation that would place new restrictions on libraries. And she’s highlighting the threat of censorship and the pressure that librarians face in a memoir, “That Librarian,” which Bloomsbury published last month.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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      These Two Books Ask, Was the Movie Better?

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      The French novel that was adapted into “Vertigo”; Cameron Crowe’s nonfiction account of a year inside a public high school.Dear readers,I once went on a coffee date with a man who, early on, confided that he had based the décor of his studio apartment on the sets of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lurid psychodrama classic, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” I found this confidence so mortifying (and the prospect of white fur rugs so alarming) that I did not see him a second time, thereby saving me from having to admit that my own studio’s décor had been inspired by Midge’s apartment in Alfred Hitchcock’s lurid psychodrama classic, “Vertigo.”I was reminded of this terrible thing by the fact that the Paris Theater here in New York just showed “Vertigo” as part of its highly-recommended BIG LOUD 2024 series, and in turn, I revisited the novel on which it was based.Often, it’s true, the book really is better. Other times, an adaptation takes workmanlike text and transforms it into something transcendent (hello, “Godfather”). Occasionally, a filmmaker and their subject are so perfectly matched that the result is more than the sum of its parts — looking at you, “The Road.” And sometimes, movies are just perfect reflections of the texts; I’d put “The Remains of the Day” in this category (although of course we could debate it for years).What I want to talk about today are two cases where the movie made me aware of the source book — a book I might otherwise have never read.— Sadie“The Living and the Dead,” by Boileau-NarcejacFiction, 1956NoneParis, 1940. A lawyer named Roger Flavières — who has a morbid fear of heights — is approached by an old friend whose wife, Madeleine, has been acting strangely; she seems to be possessed by the spirit of an ancestor who died by suicide at the same age. Roger begins to tail the beautiful Madeleine and ultimately saves her from drowning in the Seine. The two bond; she explains her melancholy obsession. Ultimately, Madeleine feels drawn to a remote village, where she throws herself from a bell tower. Roger, paralyzed by his phobia, can only watch helplessly.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 Identify These Books By Their Bad Reviews in The Times?

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      “The author undoubtedly meant her to be queer, but she is altogether too queer. She was only 11 years old when she reached the house in Prince Edward’s Island that was to be her home, but, in spite of her tender years, and in spite of the fact that, excepting for four months spent in the asylum, she had passed all her life with illiterate folks and had bad almost no schooling, she talked to the farmer and his sister as though she had borrowed Bernard Shaw’s vocabulary, Alfred Austin’s sentimentality and the reasoning powers of a Justice of the Supreme Court.” More

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      Tom Brown Jr., World-Renowned Survivalist, Is Dead at 74

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      For decades, he ran a school in the New Jersey wilderness that taught thousands of students how to survive and even thrive in the great outdoors.Tom Brown Jr., who was considered the country’s foremost authority on wilderness survival, and who taught thousands of people how to track deer, fletch arrows, forage for food and generally thrive in the great outdoors, died on Aug. 16 in Neptune, N.J. He was 74.His son Coty confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said his father had recently been in failing health.Though Mr. Brown’s trim, sturdy build and neatly coifed mustache were more reminiscent of the media magnate Ted Turner than John Rambo, he was in every way the quintessential outdoorsman.His preferred wilderness was the Pine Barrens, a vast, unpeopled expanse of sandy forest that stretches across the middle of New Jersey. He would disappear into the woods for weeks at a time, often with nothing but the clothes on his back, and emerge ruddy in health and even a few pounds heavier.“If you have clothes or a knife, then you aren’t really surviving,” he told The Maine Times in 1998.By way of income, Mr. Brown ran Tracker School, a series of weeklong courses in the intricacies of bare-bones wilderness living and what he referred to as “the wisdom of the track.”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