Features & Reviews
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Kerouac: American-French-Latino?
This account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino…
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Much Ado About Dust Jackets
A few days ago we highlighted an article about the current trend of books without dust jackets. In her latest column Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, takes us past the jacket/no jacket debate…
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L.A. on Fire
Nathanael West‘s The Day of the Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a painter trying to survive in Hollywood while planning his masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” Hackett is surrounded by dubious characters: an actress as beautiful as…
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Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys
“There’s something unique about being a member of the sex worker club, an instant camaraderie that bonds one to people who would otherwise be strangers, and this chemistry is something of which Sterry can’t get enough.”
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The Write Links
“Unsettled: The PW Survey on the Google Book Settlement” A Q&A with (rockstar) literary agent Georges Borchardt. Underground Library is hoping to do for the literary underground what MySpace has done for independent music. More on the Google settlement: “Libraries…
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The Importance of Being Still: The Rumpus Interview With Charles Baxter
In his essay, Baxter discusses the degree to which Americans “have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness.”
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Kubrick’s 1961 Lolita is the First 70s Movie
The other day I read a rambling but entertaining essay over on Bright Lights Film Journal, called All Tomorrow’s Playground Narratives, which analyzed Kubrick’s Lolita in terms of — well, approximately anything that occurred to the guy, it would seem.…
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How to Leave Hialeah
“Crucet is endowed with the double vision that helped Richard Wright and Salman Rushdie describe the lives of marginalized people with poignancy, humor, and rich music.”
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Playing With Words
One thing that fascinates me about writing is how people play with the medium: making up games and assignments to bring us together. For example the Napkin Project at Esquire, where cocktail napkins are mailed to writers and then returned,…
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Jami Attenberg: The Last Book I Loved, Everything Matters!
I was going to write this piece about A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, which is also a very good book, one that I loved, and one I recommend you read. I recently Netflixed “Apocalypse Now,” which for some…
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Poetics and Slaughter
2005 saw the seventieth anniversary of the birth of Danilo Kiš. He died of lung cancer in 1989.
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Stand Proud
“There’s a blurb on the front of the 2008 paperback edition of Elmer Kelton’s novel Stand Proud. It’s from True West magazine, and it reads, ‘One thing is certain: as long as there are writers as skillful as Elmer Kelton,…