Posts by author
Ryan Zee
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“Artful,” by Ali Smith
In one of the more memorable passages of Ali Smith’s Artful, the narrator notes how “surprisingly lightly” we treat books “in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe…
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“Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia,” by José Manuel Prieto
In 1988, Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a personal dictionary of his “key words, problem words, words I love.” Not your average lexicon, “Sixty-three words” fuses history, philosophy, social-critique and autobiography, ingeniously invigorating a literary form often lumped with the…
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“Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” by D. T. Max
Like many latecomers to his work, my introduction to David Foster Wallace began with a reading of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. I remember being struck initially, immediately, by its honesty, its rhetorical courage, its compassion.