marginalia
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Nesting Dolls: Julie Carr’s Objects from a Borrowed Confession
Would you say poetry, for you, is the vessel which houses all other forms? I would say it is for me.
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Renovating Reality: A Remembrance of J. D. McClatchy
To us he was Professor McClatchy, and he presided over our Wednesday afternoon sessions with the grace of an elegant, erudite gentleman.
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Marginalia’s Moment
At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, S. Brent Plate discusses the place of book marginalia as we go forth into the digital age: what will happen to our…
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Marginalized
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written.…
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Defining America through Marriage
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways public rhetoric and legal proceedings reshaped marriage into a new…
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Contingent Justice
LARB’s Marginalia Review of Books recently published a series of essays on the future of tenure. While addressing the academic labor crisis, the series digs deeply into our wider national labor crisis and the effects of abandoning permanent employment for…
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How Should A Person Read?
While Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always easy; I might change my mind two or three times.…
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Between the Lines
While some bibliophiles hold books as sacred artworks to be carefully preserved, others can’t read without a little back-and-forth. Laura Miller makes a case for defacing pages: Marginalia is a blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way…
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The Original Comments Section
For the New Yorker, Lauren Collins looks at what she calls “the original comments section”—old notes written in the margins of books—and our modern obsession with them.
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A Story Unfolds in the Marginalia
After finding a paperback novel strewn on an airport bench with the note: “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find it” written inside, J.J. Abrams became fascinated with the…
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Authors Deface Own Books for Charity
Literary organization English PEN has chosen an interesting way to raise funds: ask authors to annotate first editions of their books, and then auction them off. J. K. Rowling is the prize catch in terms of predicted auction money, but…
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Writing in the Margins
Here’s a different kind of year-end book list: for the New York Times, Sam Anderson looks back at the notes he left in his reading material during 2012. Have you scribbled any memorable marginalia in your own books this year? Transcribe…