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Journalist Gilbert King is the author of Devil in the Grove , a Pulitzer Prize–winning 2012 account of a battle for justice led by Thurgood Marshall. King’s new book, Bone Valley , is adapted from his acclaimed podcast about a Florida man wrongly imprisoned for 36 years.

‘All the King’s Men’ by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

A sweeping American tragedy about power, corruption, and the cost of truth, following Willie Stark, a fictional populist governor, and the reporter chronicling Stark’s journey. The prose is musical, the moral vision unsparing. I reread it before starting a new project to reset my compass—and to remember that the bar for narrat

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