Features & Reviews
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Fighting the Thousand Year War
Praveen Mavdan and Christin Evans, owners for the past two years of the Booksmith in San Francisco, are writing a series of weekly articles on the Huffington Post about their experiences running the store and, most importantly, their efforts to…
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Reviewing The Reviewers
“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews or criticism that I read online seems not simply to…
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The Beauty Of Black Sparrow Books
The love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things. If I loved to read as much as I loved books, for instance, then I wouldn’t own at least a…
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Sleeper’s Wake
John Wraith’s penis is a neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, and is central to every plot twist in the book.
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On Being A Citizen Of Literature
“There’s a scene at the end of Ugrešić’s 1993 essay collection Have A Nice Day: From The Balkan War to the American Dream where the author describes an encounter that occurred while waiting in line for her I.D. card in…
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The Big Book Club
There are books on the NEA’s list that I haven’t read and undoubtedly should read—but unless I’ve made a New Year’s resolution, I prefer to stumble upon my next book.
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Charlie Crespo: The Last Book I Loved, Infinite Jest
After reading David Foster Wallace’s short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, I was determined to read Infinite Jest. I found Wallace’s prose to be unlike anything I had ever read before and even though he used structures or techniques…
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“A Man of Confused but Deep Spirituality”
On October 21st, Jack Kerouac had been dead exactly forty years. You’d be pressed to find a more quoted, misunderstood, revered, and culturally significant icon of the latter half of the 20th century. Yet his literary contributions remain pretty controversial.…
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The Resilience of the Novel
“The media predicted the death of the book upon the advent of radio, and then again with film, and then again with television. It’s happening once more with the rise of the computer and the Internet. It’s possible that this…
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Things to Think About: Publishing Links
The Nook has become the fastest selling item at Barnes & Noble. “What the hell is social publishing?” (via @R_Nash) Robert Weil talks about editing R. Crumb’s Genesis Illustrated. “Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing?”
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A Squared-Off Landscape Representing the World
A Village Life is the work of a mature poet looking out at the world from a window, but now concerned with the larger cycles in which she participates, instead of the singular life in a petri dish.
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“My Most Embarrassing Fantasy”
“Looking at these photos, I get the sense that the writers (even the young ones) are long gone, lost to an era when people gazed longingly out of train windows, mailed handwritten letters, or actually read books. I can’t imagine…