Posts by author
Michelle Dean
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I Intend To Stop Writing About Gender Sometime I Swear
Last Saturday, after I posted the Gone Girl essay that turned into another gender-in-literature rant, I thought to myself, “Self, let’s find a new subject, surely your readers are getting bored. You are getting bored.” But then the Jonah Lehrer thing happened…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: But I Don’t Want to Get Gone
So many people were reading Gone Girl by the time I’d heard of it that I knew I had to get on the train. It’s a thriller, a potboiler. It’s terribly engaging.
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It’s Bloomsday
James Joyce’s most famous works were long, complicated and, depending on who you’re asking, arguably inaccessible novels. But writing to his four-year-old grandson Stephen (yes, that Stephen) in August 1936 he set himself out a simpler task: write a story…
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Saturday History Lesson: Dorothy Parker’s Ashes
Dorothy Parker died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack in June of 1967. She was seventy-three but had not seemed particularly sick to her friends, who still found her an avid enthusiast of whisky and cigarettes.A chambermaid found her in…
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A Saturday Rumpus List of Writers In Unsuitable Employment
This week brought another spate of bad job-creation news in the United States. This surprised, I think, precisely no one other than pundits, whose job it is to be professionally surprised. The culture of work in this country is unstable…
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A Short Note on Critics and Criticism
David Carr and A.O. Scott have a short video up at the Times about the state of modern criticism. As the length would suggest, it’s a light discussion. The subject is really the reviewing of Hollywood-Industrial-complex movies rather than criticism writ…
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
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Angelica Garnett and the Cost of the Art
I read awhile back about Angelica Garnett’s death at MobyLives, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since. She was Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece, and until she was eighteen she thought her father…
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Saint Joan, J.Diddy, You Know What We Call Her
I will first shamelessly self-promote and link you to a piece I did for the Awl this week on Joan Didion’s early reviews. I’m going to let that substitute for this week’s History Lesson, as it’s Memorial Day weekend.
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Saturday History Lesson: The Unrequited Yeats
Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I fell for that poem of his that begins, “When you are…
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Saturday Links
A few links to get you started reading this Saturday morning. (I know it’s nice out, but I took my coffee out to my little backyard and am ignoring my cat’s mournful stares from the window, and encourage you to…
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Walking While Reading (Redux)
I saw this Paris Review piece about “walking while reading” go up and got all excited. A kindred spirit, I thought. Someone else who knows that the best way to relax is to pick up a book and start walking.…