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Staff Picks: ‘The Doll,’ Minaudières

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This Week’s Reading

Daphne du Maurier.

I was thrilled when a copy of The Doll—Daphne du Maurier’s early short stories, some “lost”—arrived in the office. They’re not all amazing, but when she’s good, she’s great. There’s the same sense of cold dread that pervades Don’t Look Now and Rebecca, and the title story presages the latter’s themes of obsession. (Not to mention, the object of obsession is named … Rebecca.) —Sadie Stein

Olympia Le-Tan’s world! I dream of carrying my MetroCard and keys inside one of her handmade books, or minaudières, as they say in France. —Jessica Calderon

“I often feel that the scenes in Edward Hopper paintings are scenes from my own past” writes Mark Strand in Hopper, which pairs the artist’s paintings with Strand’s prose ruminations on them. It’s a little like meandering through a gallery with the poet. In it, “we feel the presence of what is hidden, of what surely exists but is not revealed … It weighs on us like solitude.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

I’ve been reading and rereading the lovely long poem “The Blue Book” from Anna Moschovakis’s I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone. Its circuitous logic, in which one line feeds off the one before it, is mesmerizing. Each section describes the progression of an idea as a kind of mathematical equation, proving itself even as it calls itself into question. —Nicole Rudick