Michael Berger
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Your Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know what to do with. Often in what I write, there’s …
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Poets Misbehaving In New York
At The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet. More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry. “I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican…
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The Millions Judges The Millenium (So Far)
At The Millions, a handful of writers are throwing down their two cents for the best books of the Millenium so far. Among the more moving reviews is Bret Anthony Johnson’s elegiac take on McCarthy’s The Road. I think, in…
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Three Writers Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants
Amidst all the bad news afflicting writers these days, especially good writers (not Dan Brown), it’s refreshing to see that an organization of smart, cultured rich people has an uncanny tendency to acknowledge the hard work that good writers are…
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When a Writer Becomes an Adjective
Kafka. Joyce. Woolf. Dickens. Nabokov. All of these writers have become adjectives. (Arguably, “Kafkaesque” is the most overused one of the mix. And “Nabokovian” the least-earned moniker.) Just last April, a prolific and prophetic English writer by the name of…
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Rene Daumal at Parabola
I spend a lot of my time rediscovering things. It’s a nifty, almost unconscious trick. All it necessitates is wandering through a landscape, engaging with reality and picking up on sensory cues. Whether it’s a certain food I once loved,…
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The Bohemian Manifesto
I think I was twelve when I first heard the word Bohemia. I didn’t really know what it meant but it conjured up a mist-drenched, mountainous region where men in long coats and women in peasant skirts sang the praises…
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Pittsburgh, Writer’s Haven
“According to the Post-Gazette article, writers are realizing how great Pittsburgh is, and moving there en-masse. “Of course, the article makes clear, it’s not about the money (there is not much)—it’s about being able to attend Encyclopedia Destructica’s weekly ‘binding…
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The Apocalyptic Mythologies Of Steve Erickson
There is no place on earth like Los Angeles. But everyone knows this. Yet perhaps there is not a single place on earth where the end of the world will seem like just another fly-by-night off-off-Hollywood movie, screened in the…
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The Paramount Moral Challenge Of Our Time
“Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S.…