Last Book I Loved
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Chris Huntington: The Last Book I Loved, The Brothers Karamazov
We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics…
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The Last Book I Loved: Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
I was browsing through my favorite small indie bookstore (Farley’s in New Hope, PA; it’s magnificent) when the cover and title of this book captured my eye. A book displaying peaceful nighttime ocean scene, mildly disrupted by the UFO beaming…
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Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language. “I write,” it begins. “I write that I am writing.…
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Sean Morse: Last Book I Loved, Senselessness
The last book I loved was Senselessness, written by by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and translated by Katherine Silver. I wish I could indulge a paranoid fantasy. Maybe a nice conspiracy theory centered around me. It really unburdens a person from the decision-making…
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The Last Book I Loved: Play It As It Lays
I love this book because it’s hard and true. It scares and haunts me.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Handmaid’s Tale
My boyfriend sometimes says things like, “Back in high school, I was a theater geek.” What he means is that he attended acting camps during all his summer vacations, and he played juicy supporting roles like Horatio and Don Pedro…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
I read Alice Munro’s books in benders. It usually takes me less than two days to finish one of her collections, and while reading it, I make and break promises to myself—to stop after this story, to take a shower,…
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The Last Book I Loved: Atlas of Remote Islands
Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a kid. I liked to spin it on its axis, as…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska
The last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska poem I ever read. Last week, I was on my…
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Melissa Pilakowski: The Last Book I Loved, The Borrower
You are 25 years old, and since college you’ve been shelving children’s books in a small Missouri library and living on the top floor of a theater, where you are banned from flushing your toilet during performance hours. The lives…
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Benjamin Nadler: The Last Book I Loved, The Street
I return to The Street again and again. I first read the novel when I working as a bookseller out on West 4th St. in New York. A man I sold books with lent me his copy, saying that it…
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The Last Book of Poetry I Loved: Revolver by Robyn Schiff
How do we know what we know ’til we learn what we’ve learned? Once upon a time I fashioned myself to be one of those thinkers who, as I sophomorically put it, “find the deep in the superficial.” When I…