Juan Vidal
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Readers everywhere are rediscovering the work of Brazil's Clarice Lispector. Critic Juan Vidal calls Lispector a singular artist, whose newly collected stories linger in the mind like poetry.
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Laurie Foos' gently surreal new novel is set in a small lakeside town where the local mothers bake their secret confessions into moon pies, which they feed to a silent, mysterious blue-skinned girl.
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Reviewer Juan Vidal has had the debut album by Texas soul crooner Leon Bridges on heavy rotation, and it's making him think of parallels with James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
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No American writer has been able to pin down the intersection of faith, prayer and art like Flannery O'Connor. Critic Juan Vidal reflects on her Prayer Journal, and the faith that words can live.
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Argentinian novelist Alan Pauls' latest kicks off as so many good stories do: With a dead body and a disappearing briefcase full of cash. Critic Juan Vidal calls Pauls a "master builder" of fiction.
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William Faulkner — one of the great American novelists — thought of himself as a failed poet. Which made our critic Juan Vidal wonder: What is it about poetry that makes us hold it above other arts?
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This new volume collects some of the uncompromising writer's greatest hits, from her coverage of the march on Selma to Monica Lewinsky, and of course her famous takedown of film critic Pauline Kael.
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The multitalented Alejandro Jodorowsky turns to fiction (sort of) with a semi-autobiographical novel. Critic Juan Vidal calls it "brilliant, mad, unpredictable."
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Brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were at the heart of Soviet science fiction; reviewer Juan Vidal says The Dead Mountaineer's Inn is less edgy than some of their work, but still a must-read.
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In The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño invented the "visceral realists," a group of wild writers who read anywhere and everywhere — causing critic Juan Vidal to ponder the weird places we read.