Posts by author
Elissa Bassist
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The Universal Threat of Loneliness
“The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz begins with the question, “What does the contemporary self want?” He answers after two sentences: “Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants . .…
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Last Week in the New Yorker: a Link List and Review
THE TALK OF THE TOWN TRANSITIONING by Hendrik Hertzberg You can always count on Hendrick Hertzberg to tell you what your new political stance is; more than that, he makes your already liberal opinions smarter and better focused. Since it’s Inauguration…
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Unlove: a Literary Break-Up List
To list all the poetry and prose concerned with love and/or anti-love would be to write a list of all the books ever written, and so below is an extraordinarily incomplete list of a few very good links I’ve recently…
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Subway Map of Publishing Trends
Concerned about the direction of print media? Soybits, a Spanish blog about “digital publishing and its peculiarities,” created an intricate Subway-style map based on 2008 publishing trends and projecting out. Here’s the most obvious trend: books or bookstores or writers…
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Write What You Know: Random Book Links by Elissa Bassist
James Wolcott’s review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick summed up in one piece of advice: skip the first third of the book. Unlike Hemingway, Plath, Wolfe, et al., Updike refuses to put the pen down, and now “younger novelists…
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Jonathan Baumbach Superlink
Writing (a novel, this post, anything) is “a bit like love.” Few are in it for the money or self-esteem; you pursue it because you can’t not and because at some point, it feels good and right and like one…
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Companion Links to Ariel Levy’s Article on The Joy of Sex
“If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on The Joy of Sex, you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations.”