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    <title>The Fiction Shelf</title>
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    <description>Literary fiction, three books an edition — what the novel is doing, who it is for, and whether it earns its length.</description>
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      <title>Never Let Me Go: Why Ishiguro Makes You Wait</title>
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      <description>Ishiguro delays the premise for a hundred pages, and that delay is the novel&apos;s entire moral case.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>must-read</category>
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      <title>Beloved: The Ghost Story That Won&apos;t Let You Read It Straight</title>
      <link>https://floppygroup.com/posts/beloved-the-ghost-story-that-won-t-let-you-read-it-straight-09-19/</link>
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      <description>Morrison&apos;s difficulty isn&apos;t decoration; it&apos;s the only honest way to tell this particular story.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>top-pick</category>
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      <title>Stoner is a novel about an unremarkable life, and it is devastating</title>
      <link>https://floppygroup.com/posts/stoner-john-williams/</link>
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      <description>Published in 1965, forgotten, rediscovered fifty years later. Almost nothing happens and it is hard to finish dry-eyed.</description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>top-pick</category>
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      <title>Gilead is a letter from a dying man to a son who cannot read yet</title>
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      <description>A Congregationalist minister in 1950s Iowa writes down what he can before he goes. Quiet, and much harder than it appears.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>must-read</category>
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      <title>The Blue Flower does in 225 pages what most novels need 600 for</title>
      <link>https://floppygroup.com/posts/the-blue-flower-fitzgerald/</link>
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      <description>Penelope Fitzgerald&apos;s last novel: 18th-century Germany, a real poet, and the most efficient historical fiction in English.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>hidden-gem</category>
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      <title>My Brilliant Friend, and whether to commit to all four</title>
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      <description>The opening of the Neapolitan Quartet works alone. It also makes stopping there very difficult.</description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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