Michael Berger
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Tandem Reading
I’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue…
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Action! Violence! Jilted Lovers! Pulp History!
David Talbot, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, came into Red Hill Books recently to drop off his latest creation, Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story Of The Man Who Saved America, one of the first installments in the Pulp History series…
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Margaret Atwood’s Unusual Book Tour
Here’s something I missed from earlier this month: Margaret Atwood took her recent dystopian novel, The Year Of The Flood on the road with thespians, activists and a documentary film team! Personally, I think book tours should integrate as many…
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More Literary Trading Cards!
I grew up collecting baseball cards. They were my first passion. It was an exciting hobby because every pack initiated a quest. It wasn’t that I cared much for the game but I was just an inveterate collector, especially of…
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Why Reading Kept Me Out Of Jail
I wasn’t a bad kid growing up, I just liked to steal things — vodka, cigars, communion wine — and set things on fire. Once or twice I used profanity in the presence of a nun. But I only had…
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Elitist White People Trying To Make Themselves Feel Better
(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains…
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Books For The Dark Night Of The Soul
In his late thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a series of emotional and mental breakdowns, many of which he wrote about in a series of random essays and observations collected under the title, The Crack-Up. At the beginning of the…
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Hitchens On Dying
“At a luncheon earlier in the day with Hitchens and Berlinski, Taunton asked Hitchens about his health problems. ‘Well, I’m dying, since you asked,’ Hitchens replied. ‘So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund…
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Early Impressions Of Orange Eats Creeps
After negotiating a last minute address change, among other last minute changes, I finally received my much-anticipated copy of The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. I haven’t had much time with it yet but, after the first twenty pages,…
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The Horniest Species Imaginable
“Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but…
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Remembering Tony Judt
Tony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series…
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Erickson Eats Oranges, Or How To Really Like A Book
I’m a sucker for blurbs, I have to admit. But then writers blurb their friends, right? It’s just the right thing to do, so maybe it doesn’t say that much about the book. Yet I’m always looking to see what…