Books
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The Journal Of Albion Moonlight
“Carol wants me to write a novel: ‘You’ve met so many interesting people,’ she tells me. Very good, there was a young man and he could never get his hands on enough women. That’s a novel. There was an idiot…
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Akashic Press Has A New Blog
“Living in Brooklyn (as 3/4 of the Akashic Staff does), discussions about Irony usually in end hipster-bashing sessions. Williamsburg is rendered as a mecca of self-posturing, detachment and apathy. It’s easy to be negative! Enter Trinie Dalton, who does the…
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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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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 Rumpus Interview with Alasdair Gray
Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry.
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The Kakutani Two-Step
“The Kakutani Two-Step. It works roughly like this: belittle a novelist’s finest work to date – preferably by tossing around unsupported adjectives…say, “arbitrary,” “flimsy,” and “unfinished.” Then, five or six years later, when the novelist in question brings forth his…
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On The Forgotten Magic Of Writing
“I’m so, so tired of reading about how writing should be demystified, how it doesn’t work the way Cortazar describes at all, how you toil at it slowly like you’re scrubbing a toilet, how the important parts are rewriting everything…
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Big Machine: The New Novel I’m Most Excited About Reading
Every Tuesday the new books arrive at my store. I get to slice open the boxes, pull out the books, price them and arrange them in the most appealing and eye-catching way possible. Because I don’t personally order them, it’s…
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A New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
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Morning Coffee
90 Years of Vogue Magazine covers. You know, if that’s your thing. New Scientist wants to tell you about the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. Sometimes extreme measures are needed to stop book theft. NY Magazine on…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
It’s your humble Sunday guest editor back in the hot seat again for another wild ride through the bookblogosphere! Today is special to me because the Folsom Fair will be happening which, if you’ve never been, is one of the…