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St. Louis-born author Jane Smiley has won a Pulitzer and published more than 25 books, but she has never set a book in her hometown — until now. Lucky, which dropped last month, is an alternative history of Smiley’s life: What if, when attending John Burroughs high school, she fell in love with music and songwriting instead of books and writing?
‘What use is ruin?’ asks Emily Wilkes, protagonist of I’m Dying Laughing, the posthumous novel by the Australian Marxist author Christina Stead. ‘Communists should not be ruined: they should stay on top.’ Unfortunately for Emily, ruin is the abiding theme of Stead’s impressive and neglected oeuvre. Her last novel, left unfinished and assembled from drafts by her literary trustee after her death in 1983, occupied her for at least the final thirty years of her life. Its incompleteness is a testament to the difficulty of capturing the full ruinous extent of the lives of its characte...