Posts by author
Michael Berger
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Coetzee Caught Smiling
Apparently, the normally stone-faced recluse J.M. Coetzee was caught smiling — if only for a second. I would like to see Coetzee share the podium with Cormac McCarthy one of these days. Although I’m no authority on McCarthy, it strikes…
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A History Of Emoticons
“In 1887, Ambrose Bierce wrote an essay, ‘For Brevity and Clarity,’ suggesting ways to alter punctuation to better represent tone. He proposed a single bracket flipped horizontally for wry smiles, ‘to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular…
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Books For The Summer Travel Itch
Now that it’s summertime, one in three people who shop at my bookstore are looking for travel guides, phrase books, travelogues or history books about some enticing destination. Yesterday a woman bought a Russian phrase book. I told her that…
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Infinite Genji
First it was Infinite Jest and now readers will be tackling the world’s oldest novel this summer, Tale Of Genji. I want someone to have a summer of The Recognitions next. Or Don Quixote or Crime And Punishment. Or maybe…
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On The City And The City
“‘No two persons ever read the same book,’ the writer and critic Edmund Wilson said. Let me expand that sentiment outward into the geography of experience: it seems increasingly clear to me that no two persons live in the same…
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The Rumpus Gets More Love
“The impressive writing makes The Rumpus stand out. Rick Moody’s Swinging Modern Sounds column matches up against any music blog, and its staff and roster of contributing authors always come through with insightful commentary, regardless of the topic. Books, comics,…
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Summer Rereading
“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other from the tree of time. “Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game…
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A Dog Is Barking Everywhere
Foghorns show up in much of my writing, but that’s because I cultivate a disingenuously melancholy disposition that my actual life, full of hilarity and good-natured insults, completely belies. But today I discovered that “a distant barking dog” appears in…
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Utopia, What Are You Good For?
“But the question lingers: Apart from its questionable value as a marketing strategy, what is utopia good for?” Paul La Farge at Bookforum on the concept and uses of utopia, with special mention of San Francisco and Burning Man.
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I Have Written The Most Important Fictional Novel On Earth
I feel bad for most writers who want to get published or make money from their writing, including myself. But I never feel that bad — after all, writing is a privilege that not everybody can do, or even should…
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Learning French, And Other Escapes
“Here I am wanting some other language to rescue me, wanting some escape route, when the very desire to transform, to mean something in the world, to take to the air, is such a chubby little caterpillar urge. If I…
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Demanding a Degree of Strangeness
“It might be your own past, or even just the tomb of someone you’d forgotten and who, awakened from the deep slumber of oblivion, comes to life and steps onto the page and, like a magician, plucks out of the…