Last Book I Loved
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THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: Eleanor & Park
I was born in 1986, the year that this story takes place, but like Eleanor I remember sitting on a boy’s carpet and feeling uncomfortable and excited and getting mixtapes and shaking for hours after kissing someone once.
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The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Sara Habein on the last book of poems she loved, Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Snow for Wallace Stevens” by Terrance Hayes
The only time I had the privilege to meet Jake Adam York was after a panel he participated in at the 2012 AWP Conference. The panel was called “In White: White Poets and Race,” and I was hooked. For so…
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The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place
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The Last Book I Loved: The Unnamed
Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation.
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The Last Book I Loved: House of Leaves
There is nothing about the act of reading House of Leaves that is passive. This book requires effort.
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The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers—especially once-famous, forgotten ones.
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The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down
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The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents.
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The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death—and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face—now generally take place…
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The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
The first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts…
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The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself.