Jason Heller
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
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Reports of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso have dominated the news in recent days; Robert Jackson Bennett's novella Vigilance draws a direct line from today's America to a bullet-riddled future.
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As heat waves roll across Europe and storms pummel the American South, literature is responding. But climate fiction — or cli-fi — is nothing new, and we've got a roundup of some classics.
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Craig Laurance Gidney's debut adult novel is set in a marshy, mysterious rural town where a community of artists, students and townspeople are united by visions of a strange, pinkish-purple color.
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Cradled in his homespun warmth, Justin Townes Earle's husky drawl feels like the darkness before the dawn.
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Hornsby's new album is as melodic as his past oeuvre, but it's also an absorbing peek into the veteran musician's love of avant-garde classical, jazz and progressive rock.
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Pete Shelley, the Mancunian co-founder and singer of Buzzcocks, embedded a vulnerability and honesty into early punk's genetic code, forever changing the genre.
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Author Nicholas Eames's series The Band is a joyous mashup of classic rock and fantasy tropes — because if there were monsters, why wouldn't there be bands of celebrity mercenaries to slay them?
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The wildly talented Tuareg guitarist returns to his North African roots on his latest album.
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Chandler Klang Smith's novel, set in a crumbling far-future metropolis menaced by dragons, is a dizzying, delirious crash of wonders and grotesqueries, spiked with crackling dialogue and detail.
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The American Southwest continues to inform Calexico's sprawling, cross-cultural indie rock, but here it's a more self-contained, even lonesome affair.