Features & Reviews
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Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Let’s face it: Even when you’re breaking up with a Dungeon Master who used to call you his “Faerie Dragon,” you still know you’re breaking up.
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A Special Case of Plagiarism
Earlier today Chris blogged about a guy who’s translating Moby-Dick into emoji. Which reminded me of something. Recently one of our favorite writers, Damion Searls, was pondering a 2007 abridgment of Moby-Dick called Moby-Dick in Half the Time. The New…
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Your Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know what to do with. Often in what I write, there’s …
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Poets Misbehaving In New York
At The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet. More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry. “I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican…
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The Millions Judges The Millenium (So Far)
At The Millions, a handful of writers are throwing down their two cents for the best books of the Millenium so far. Among the more moving reviews is Bret Anthony Johnson’s elegiac take on McCarthy’s The Road. I think, in…
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Three Writers Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants
Amidst all the bad news afflicting writers these days, especially good writers (not Dan Brown), it’s refreshing to see that an organization of smart, cultured rich people has an uncanny tendency to acknowledge the hard work that good writers are…
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The Plight of the Eloquent
At the beginning of Avenue Q, the Broadway Musical notorious for its puppets who say and do dirty things, the fresh-out-of-college Princeton glides onto the stage (as well as puppets can glide), assumes a singing position, and earnestly asks the…
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Books, Movies, Magic: The Rediscovered Genius of the Automaton
I recently read “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a sort of hybrid graphic-young adult novel by Brian Selznik that tells a fictionalized story revolving around Georges Méliès, the frenchman who was the first filmmaker to employ cinematic tricks in narrative.
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“The New Literacy”
Kids these days. With their facebook, twitter, and texts. They’re always wasting time on the internet, bouncing from one thing to the next, hardly able to focus long enough to read, let alone to write, right? Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford…
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Things to Think About: Publishing Links
A handful of literary agencies deepen their commitment to publicity. The Dayton Literary Peace Prizes, which recognize “the power of literature to promote peace and nonviolence,” have been announced. An interview with Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666 and The Savage…
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More Adderall
“It’s a common misperception that for some reason we should be telling stories about other people instead of ourselves.” An interview with Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott over at Memoirville. Also, check out the new Adderall Diaries homepage.
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Not the Greatest Villains Then Living in the World
The other week, The New Yorker published an excellent article by Caleb Crain about the peculiar economics and politics of life aboard a pirate ship in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the captain of an English slave ship was…