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January 13, 2026 
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| Mia Oberländer |
Dear readers,
Is there a full moon? We’ve been having a very madcap kind of week over here at the Book Review. Take Madeline Cash’s debut novel, “Lost Lambs,” about a rather precious family that comes off like a middle-class Royal Tenenbaums. One of our reviews this week is headlined, simply, “Have Some Spare Time? Why Not Build a Medieval War Machine?” which seems definitionally madcap. My favorite contestant in this pageant of eccentricity is the illustration accompanying Alexandra Jacobs’s review of “The Hitch,” which involves a child possessed by a corgi named Hazel. How’s that for a creative brief?
We do have more serious fare, of course. Belle Burden spun her viral divorce essay into a memoir, and talked to us about the experience of writing it. And for all the Knausgaard fans out there, our foremost literary practitioner of Scandinavian masculinity has a new novel available in English, and we have a guide to his most essential work. Not madcap, but certainly a little mad.
See you on Friday.
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