Other
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Murakami Wisdom
When you come out of a storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is about. The Shortlist calls Haruki Murakami the “Yoda of Japanese Literature.” If you’re in need of some good advice…
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Do Likable Characters Equal Likable Stories?
I wonder if that is the case for many of us. Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives,…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
I usually try and steer clear of politics here, but the New Yorker’s look at the GOP’s suicide caucus is top-notch. We’ve got some big Martian water news for you. Atlas-Obscura wants to talk to you about bloody, sexy ancient…
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Did you miss National Punctuation Day?
Every year in September there is “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis,” as stated on the official National Punctuation Day website. If you’re looking for…
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New Kind of Art: A @horse_ebooks Roundup
For the past few years, the Twitter account @horse_ebooks has delighted hundreds of thousands of followers with algorithmically generated excerpts of found text like “Everything happens so much,” “Crying is great exercise,” and “Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.”…
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Happy Birthday, T. S. Eliot!
Don’t let that Oxford education and British citizenship fool you: 125 years ago today, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He went on to become one of the defining voices of the modernist movement with poems like The…
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The Return of the Indie Bookstore
Could Amazon actually be helping indie bookstores? It seems counterintuitive, but after a devastating reduction in numbers in the late ’90s, the American Booksellers’ Association has finally started to grow—albeit slowly—since 2005. Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader argues that…
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Fantasy Football for Poets: Week Four
Because a literary magazine definitely needs a Fantasy Football series.
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Reading Rainbow: The Next Generation
If you or your kids have been near a TV in the past few decades, you probably went gaga for Reading Rainbow, the PBS children’s show hosted by LeVar Burton that encouraged young people to read. The show is no…
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Test Scores Over Football Scores
Officials in Pasco County, Florida, have considered squeezing athletic budgets for each of the past six years. They’ve so far agreed to cut about 700 education jobs, and they extended winter break in 2011, but sports have been left mostly…
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“What the Hell Is A ‘Writer of Color,’ Anyway?”
As part of her latest push to get the literary community talking seriously about diversity, our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has a piece up at the Nation about some of the thrilling, confounding, challenging books by writers of color out right…
