Buzzfeed Books
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Until Death
There’s a piece of writing advice that tritely insists that great pain makes for great writing. In reality, it often takes years to find the words for a painful event, and even then there is the nagging insufficiency of words…
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Learning the Special Way
…one day she offered me an even better, bigger bribe: If I mastered all my writing skills and got up to speed on my classwork, I could write a play, which would be performed at school. For BuzzFeed Books, Charlie Jane…
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All About Eva
She’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle.…
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A Portable James Baldwin
I came to her place to take a picture of Baldwin’s typewriter. This is what I told her. But I think I also came because I wanted to see someone who is his flesh and blood. I wanted to see…
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Rubbing Elbows
Sometimes it feels like New York isn’t full of interesting people so much as people who are more interesting than you. For BuzzFeed Books, John Wray describes the mediocrity of being surrounded by greatness: Who did I think I was,…
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The Autobiographical Novel
Why is it not a memoir, people will ask. I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. Alexander Chee gives step-by-step instructions on how to write an autobiographical novel, and it’s beautiful.
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To the West and Back
Riding my bicycle over the Manhattan Bridge, I see the city, instead of scuttling beneath it. And it is beautiful. Parks. Markets. Blossoms. People. Dresses. Pavement. This city is alive and full of wonder and I am just one lost…
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Renata Adler: No Fearlessness
At Buzzfeed Books, a great, pithy interview with novelist and journalist Renata Adler, whose collection of nonfiction and journalism, After the Tall Timber, was released earlier this year.
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Unlike Friends
All we knew was that Casper, with his genius IQ, his measured laugh, his wicked weltanschauung, was somebody really, really interesting to hang out with. A neighborhood kid like anybody else, only not like anybody else. One of us, only…
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A Life in Books
Often I wouldn’t be able to keep up, like with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but it made it feel like a whole new world of books had been opened up to me, dangerous and menacing and completely appealing to my teenage…
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A Southern Northerner
Through the South, I tried to make sense of what seemed similarly wrong with the North. Over at BuzzFeed Books, James Hannaham explains why he decided to be a “Southern writer” despite his New York origins.
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The Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box…