Posts by author
Michael Berger
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The Millions Judges The Millenium (So Far)
At The Millions, a handful of writers are throwing down their two cents for the best books of the Millenium so far. Among the more moving reviews is Bret Anthony Johnson’s elegiac take on McCarthy’s The Road. I think, in…
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Three Writers Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants
Amidst all the bad news afflicting writers these days, especially good writers (not Dan Brown), it’s refreshing to see that an organization of smart, cultured rich people has an uncanny tendency to acknowledge the hard work that good writers are…
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Imagine No Religion?
The other day I was walking down Mission Street in San Francisco and I saw a billboard on the side of a passing bus that read, “Imagine No Religion.” It was done in the style of stained glass, deliberately meant…
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Depression May Be Beneficial (For Writers)
“Yet some scientists are suggesting that depression — peculiarly prevalent for a mental disorder — is not a malfunction at all, but an evolutionary adaptation, a state of mind which can have debilitating effects, but also promotes highly analytical thinking.”…
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When a Writer Becomes an Adjective
Kafka. Joyce. Woolf. Dickens. Nabokov. All of these writers have become adjectives. (Arguably, “Kafkaesque” is the most overused one of the mix. And “Nabokovian” the least-earned moniker.) Just last April, a prolific and prophetic English writer by the name of…
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Rene Daumal at Parabola
I spend a lot of my time rediscovering things. It’s a nifty, almost unconscious trick. All it necessitates is wandering through a landscape, engaging with reality and picking up on sensory cues. Whether it’s a certain food I once loved,…
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The Bohemian Manifesto
I think I was twelve when I first heard the word Bohemia. I didn’t really know what it meant but it conjured up a mist-drenched, mountainous region where men in long coats and women in peasant skirts sang the praises…
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Pittsburgh, Writer’s Haven
“According to the Post-Gazette article, writers are realizing how great Pittsburgh is, and moving there en-masse. “Of course, the article makes clear, it’s not about the money (there is not much)—it’s about being able to attend Encyclopedia Destructica’s weekly ‘binding…
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The Apocalyptic Mythologies Of Steve Erickson
There is no place on earth like Los Angeles. But everyone knows this. Yet perhaps there is not a single place on earth where the end of the world will seem like just another fly-by-night off-off-Hollywood movie, screened in the…
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The Paramount Moral Challenge Of Our Time
“Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S.…
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I Wish I Was Anne Carson
Of the many professors of literature I had at Santa Cruz, none captured my imagination or gained my admiration so much as the Classics professors did. Not that I was a Classics major by any stretch but I did happen…
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An Unknown Master Of Horror
“Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling…