Features & Reviews
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France’s Fixed-Price Book Law
France has a law in place, established in 1981, that requires all booksellers in the country — big-box stores, independent stores, online retailers — to sell a given book at the same price as all their competitors. (Stores can do…
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The Last Book I Loved: Berlin
I’m going to say something a reviewer should never say about a series still in development: Berlin is a great book. We’re only up to book two [Berlin Book One: City Of Stones and Berlin Book Two: City Of Smoke]…
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A Vowel Away From Master
These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the poems, and the speaker and his father, that’s almost too…
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Corduroy for Fops and Fly Girls
Today, 11/11, is Corduroy Appreciation Day. In honor of this wonderfully waled fabric, the Corduroy Appreciation Club is holding a Grand Meeting at the Old American Can Factory with keynote speaker author Sloane Crosley. I’m not sure whether corduroy gentleman…
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The Last Book I Loved: An African in Greenland
I grabbed An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie from the fabulous New York travel bookstore, Idlewild, after my event with Stephen Elliott. I’d heard about the book for years as an incredible read for anybody who adores anthropology adventure…
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Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
The year I met Steve Almond was also the year I picked up (Not That You Asked) and the year I read his gorgeous homage to Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.”
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Heartlands
Four debut authors—Josh Weil, Skip Horack, Holly Goddard Jones, and Amy Greene—paint varied pictures of the South they know.
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Notable San Francisco, This Week: 11/9-11/15
This week, get down with The Rumpus at Hate To Be Alone, learn how to go down at Women Like Me with Carol Queen, and redefine Jewish identity at Austin Ratner’s reading for The Hub. Then, stop by the 8th…
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Notable New York, This Week 11/9 – 11/15
This week in New York Ben Marcus and Rivka Galchen at Harper’s Magazine’s The Family Table, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach talk, Mary Gaitskill, John Turturro, and Eric Bogosian at PEN benefit, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary La Danse, Jeff Lewis and…
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Serialization, Part 1.
Shya Scanlon has written an essay for The Faster Times entitled “Stay Tuned: on the Future of Web Serialization.” The essay is about the different types of literary serialization Scalon has noticed on the net. Though Scalon admits that it…
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Breaking: Writers Are Eccentric And Enjoy Bathtubs, Charts
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed a bunch of writers to see how they do it. Of course, they called it “How to Write a Great Novel,” but I’m not sure if trying to copy exactly what these writers do…
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What Authors Have To Do With It
“When I first read E.B.White, I was brand new to reading and brand new to life. It didn’t occur to me that he was some man, that his characters were invented in his head, or based on himself, or based on…