Lit Hub
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The Hardest Thing to Survive
As a kid I was that literal, thinking I lived in fiction, so let me write it. It started there, and it seems it’s going to end there. In a conversation excerpted from Upstairs at the Strand, Junot Diaz and Hilton…
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Stranger than Real Life
At Lit Hub, Tobias Carroll discusses the enduring appeal of strange fairy tales, and their influence on contemporary fiction: They remind us that the larger world is inherently complex, that the lessons imparted by stories of wicked creatures and good-hearted…
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The Novel as a Character
At Lit Hub, an excerpt from a vivid, metaphor-rich conversation that appears in the spring issue of BOMB Magazine in which Christopher Sorrentino calls the novel an “impoverished count, living in a ransacked villa, dressing for dinner every day,” while Dana…
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The Complicated Blurring of Reality, Fiction, and Social Work
What can a person really know for sure, except that one is the writer of the thing one is writing? When you type the words this writer, you are on solid ground for a moment, as solid as you can get in…
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Introducing Allen Ginsberg
Over at Lit Hub, Bill Morgan introduces a selection of Allen Ginsberg’s poems from the upcoming Wait Till I’m Dead: At times he grew weary of the work and complained that he was overburdened, but the complaint often took the…
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Reading on Reading on Reading
Reading Montaigne, the god of the sinuous modern essay, the essay that invites the reader to watch the writer write, is “reading him reading,” and reading others reading him before. At Lit Hub, Hannah Brooks-Motl describes how reading stimulates the self-consciousness…
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Re-Rethinking Harper Lee
At Lit Hub, Kate Jenkins discusses Southern literature’s clumsy history in dealing with race, and theorizes that, in light of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee may have actually been much more ahead of her time than we thought: Did…
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February 25th, 1956
… met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week; will probably never see him again… but wrote my best poem about him afterwards—the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be…
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The Big Idea: John Freeman
John Freeman, Executive Editor at Lit Hub, talks with Suzanne Koven about his new print-only literary magazine Freeman’s, the difference between between criticism and editing, and his fear of flying.
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Stacks on Stacks
Remind yourself that you are in control. The New Yorker is there for you and not the other way around. It is your feelings that matter in this relationship. Sure, we all subscribe. But who really has time to read…
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The Page Is Mightier than the Screen
For Lit Hub, David Denby reflects on the danger of losing young readers because of the influence of cell phone and computer screens: Electronic utopians say, “Calm down, nothing has been lost. If anything, the opportunities for reading have become much…