Posts by author
Michael Berger
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Joining The Penny Club
“Writers love to watch their online listings. First, there’s watching the rankings that can be ginned up by a one-day spike. Then noticing, sometimes within days of being listed, used and like new copies of their books for sale by…
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Dyer On Reader’s Block
“If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad…
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No Government World Record
I’m only a little bit Belgian but enough to have pride when “my country” celebrates a new record: going the longest of any country without a functioning government. To honor this record, I suggest a monastic ale paired crash course…
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Wisdom Of The Day
Comes from Gary Snyder from his influential and beautiful book of essays, The Practice Of The Wild. It’s in the opening essay, “The Etiquette Of Freedom” where he says: “Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness,…
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Swamps Meet Hitchcock
“So I guess I don’t feel like I seek strangeness out—I feel like we’re all surrounded by it—but there’s so much bewildering noise in our culture right now, at such a deafening and constant volume, that it’s easy for me…
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Zadie Smith On Novel Writing
“Fiction needs intellect, but it can’t survive on intellect alone. . .It has to arrive at the other embarrassing things, things that seem too banal to talk about in like the appreciation of small details of things that other people…
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Paris Review Spring Issue
Paris Review announces it’s Spring Issue which will include the first part of a serialized novel by Bolaño!
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On Prose, Pararadoxes and Proofs
“But even from the inside of a human life, it’s possible to see when you’ve made a baby seal out of thin air, and someone is coming along to bash its head in with a club, because its coat is…
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Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by…
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The Lay Of The Land
As a writer trying to write about “America,” my biggest struggle has been fully grasping the variety of spaces that is contained within America. Which is why I’ve been an avid supporter of the Center For Land Use Interpretation for…
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When Criticism Becomes Disrespect
At The Book Beast, Sean Manning wonders why The New York Times Book Review “would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.”
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The H.D. Book: A Clarion Call for all Artists and Writers
In school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering meaning in the ruins of war. One of the founding…