Last Book I Loved
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Alyssa Roibal: The Last Book I Loved, Glaciers
Alexis M. Smith’s Glaciers is a story for daydreamers, for people who see a story where others do not. It is not epic and it won’t change your life, but it has affected me greatly. I love when a short,…
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The Last Book (of Poems) I Loved: Coeur de Lion
Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions.
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The Last Book I Loved: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend. First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hygiene and the Assassin
I enjoyed this almost in the way one would enjoy a parable cut out of a much larger, didactic, philosophical novel.
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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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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 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…
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The Last Book I Loved: West with the Night
Her mother was a nurse, shot in World War II in Nepal. She—my mother-in-law—was an Ivy League-educated, motorcycle-driving, garden-planting veterinarian in Vermont… with a pilot’s license. When she passed away after a bout with cancer, two weeks after the birth…
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The Last Book I Loved: Mathilda Savitch
I befriended this narrator immediately—not necessarily because I agreed with her, but because I believed her.
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Robert Stubblefield The Last Book I Loved, Honey in the Horn
Ask a group of book-loving Oregonians who their only Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction is, and what do you suppose the percentage of correct answers might be? Easier to predict would perhaps be the most frequent incorrect answer. My money…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Triggering Town
When I read Richard Hugo’s “The Triggering Town” essay some years ago, I understood it intuitively and from my own experience of writing.