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From The New York Times: Paul La Farge, Inventive Novelist, Is Dead at 52

Paul La Farge, whose well-regarded novels played audaciously with history and narrative technique as they explored how the past can affect the present, died on Jan. 18 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 52.

His wife, Sarah Stern, said the cause was cancer.

Mr. La Farge’s novels and short stories defied easy categorization, but they were all characterized by a sort of writer’s derring-do.

“With each novel he would set out, and then it would become clear to him that he had set what seemed like an impossible formal challenge for himself,” Ms. Stern, the artistic director of the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, said by email, “but he would keep on, wrestling forward and sideways and backwards, and eventually the story and its form would be inextricable in a way that was awe-inspiring and yet felt inevitable.”

Read full post on The New York Times