NYRB
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Patti Smith’s “Obsessively Literary” New Memoir
Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien discusses iconic poet and punk-rocker Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train: What the book expresses supremely well is the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky,…
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The President Chats Up Marilynne Robinson
We already know that President Obama is a well-read man, his trips to the bookstore always yielding stacks of books to devour, and now he tries his hand at interviewing one of his favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson. The New York…
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The Lobster, or a Critique of Circe’s New Dating App
In a world where no romantic attachment meant you were turned into an animal, which creature would your lonely self choose? Francine Prose, author of Bullyville, Blue Angels, and many others, writes about the strange, wholly imagined parallel worlds of…
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The National Book of America, According to Borges
The English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person. Or, in Goethe’s case, we have the Germans who are easily roused to…
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The Struggle for Literary Inspiration
Few writers are as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates, and over at the New York Review of Books, she masterfully tackles the concept of inspiration throughout an impressive span of literary history, covering Plato, Dickinson, Joyce, Woolf, James. Her take?…
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Word of the Day: Oblivescence
(n.); the process of forgetting; “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. When we read a book for the first time, the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after…
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Bechdel on Broadway
Part of what’s fascinating about the Broadway adaptation, with its script and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, is how closely it adheres to the outline and details of Bechdel’s story—yet so differs from the book that…
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“We Don’t Smoke in Muskogee”
Nicholas Lemann breaks down America’s social castes at the New York Review of Books.
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Bedtime Reading with Charles Simic
Poet Charles Simic, in a piece on the NYRB blog, shares his quest for the perfect bedtime reading strategy. Simic turns to books to settle his mind for the night, but must be careful with his choices: I read only…
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“The Woes of the Wannabe”
The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colors everything [my students] do….It will be hard for those who have never suffered this obsession to appreciate how all-conditioning and all-consuming it…
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Why We Write About What We Write About
At the New York Review of Books‘s blog, Tim Parks explores how authors might subconsciously get inspiration for their novels from unresolved personal conflicts. Specifically, he reflects on the lives of Chekhov and Faulkner, making connections between their real-life hardships and the…
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Cut and Paste with Intention
However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control. Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting…