nonfiction
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Fiction or Non fiction: That is the question
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction? Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar. Mishra answers, “Even writers working within the old verities of stability and coherence — we…
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“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she…
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0–9
0) The beginning of all this, maybe. This woman who insists I could have loved anybody. We saw the Atlantic from Normandy. We saw the Pacific from San Francisco. This is not “my love is like an ocean.” We’d been…
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The Untidy World
“In truth, memory’s great betrayal, that it will not lie intact in wait for us, is lament enough to revisit in every generation. This is what I go to nonfiction for, the way we pick at the scab, poke our…
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On Why We Need Some Critics Like Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses puts the author’s critical and nonfiction prowess on display. It’s a collection of essays and writing from his newspaper column (which was titled Between Parentheses), compiled after the publication of The Savage Detectives. Most of the…
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Here Я Some Essays I Like
Every so often, I post links to a bunch of very short essays that only take a second to read but that made my day better. Hopefully, they’ll make your’s better too. “Last night, I had a little power at…
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Why Read Nonfiction?
Over at The Utne Reader, Keith Goetzman asks a question originally posed by John D’Agata, “Do we read (nonfiction) to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Because I have way too much time on my hands, and because it’s oddly fitting this week, the book blog roundup is in the form of a dialogue between a hopeless writer and his roommate, who is stoned and watching…
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Jim Shepard on Writing Fiction That’s Got Some Truth to It
“The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: …
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Glenn Beck is the New John Updike
“For the past nine months, ever since a certain somebody seized the White House, conservative pundits have dominated the ranks of nonfiction. … It would be easy enough, and rather predictable, to lament this state of affairs and to find…
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For the love of God, we are not Generation Y
A little while ago, I got sick of hearing that my generation—which for some God awful reason is called Generation Y—was spoiled, lazy and stupid, all while we were fighting wars (one of which, I seem to remember, we were…