American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman 292pp, Soft Skull Press, £9.99 "I'm often distracted from the things I must do," says the narrator of Lynne Tillman's exasperating yet strangely intriguing new novel.
There is a strangely New York feel to the upstairs dining-room, overlooking London's thespery, with De Gournay wallpaper, pastel colours, and very 20th-century Italian artwork.
Strangely, New York state is neither.
Strangely, the new 96th Street station at Broadway was also cited, although perhaps all the recent construction has sent rodents scurrying.
Strangely, the new house bears the same plaque the old one had, identifying it as a 19th-century cultural monument in which Mr. Popkov lived.
Such toxic descriptions splatter across the pages like a summer downpour in "Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolickk's evocative, strangely moving new biography of a largely forgotten novelist with a poisonous character.
Strangely, the new, deluxe reissue of this 2010 album includes covers of Simon and Garfunkel and Rihanna with heavy vocal processing, the precise opposite of the sound Ms. Grannis has been honing online.
Kaine pointed out that Trump's proposal would draw maternity-leave money from state unemployment funds, which was both "stigmatizing" and meant, strangely, that new mothers would be competing for the money with unemployed workers.
Hammons's strangely moving new installation, entitled "Concerto in Black and Blue," consists entirely of pitch-dark rooms that visitors are invited to explore with tiny flashlights in the company of other visitors whose presence is registered only by whisperings, footsteps, and firefly points of blue light.
And from that moment on, this melancholy, world-weary middle-aged woman, disappointed in her life and her loves almost since coming down to America from her birthplace on the high plains of Saskatchewan, began to preside over the remaining seven years of her strangely nomadic new friend's final phase of grounding.
