reading
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Children’s Books Written By Adult Authors!
“After years of finding children’s books tucked away in authors’ bibliographies (Graham Greene wrote children’s books!), followed by quick disappointment (how can they be out of print?), I realized that I was having this same frustrating revelation over and over.…
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We’re All Poets Now?
“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s become involuted and forgotten the reader. Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry,…
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All I’ve Got Left Are Unread Pages
I like looking at my books and often spend several minutes in the evening running my gaze over them. Most of them I haven’t read but the possibility that I will read them is deeply exciting. (Proust is also excited…
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Leafing Through Old Lit Magazines
Sometimes you read a story published almost a hundred years ago in a magazine and you ask yourself, “Would this stand a chance of getting published today?” These sentences are long, tangential and laden with disruptive conjunctions. This narrator is…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Good things happen when people who grow up listening to Thriller become poets. There’s going to be a new Bukowski exhibit down Southern California way, including his “annotated racing forms” that will teach you his system for playing the horses.…
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Grief And Hamlet
“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing. I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not…
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Can You Love a Non-Reader?
Friday, we linked to GIANT’s list of reasons writers should not date other writers, but Evan Maloney at The Guardian goes into the flip-side of that question: Can a reader date a nonreader? “What difference does it make in a relationship…
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Science Saturday
Tasmanian Devils may wind up extinct, and not due to humans driving them out of their habitat. The culprit is a contagious cancer. The British NHS claims sex is good for you. Yet another argument for universal health care? The…
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The Rumpus Interview with McSweeney’s Publisher Oscar Villalon
“These things, writing and reading, are never, I don’t think were ever, ever meant to be exclusive from anything else. I think they were always meant to be part of the grand fabric of life.”
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The Beauty Of Black Sparrow Books
The love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things. If I loved to read as much as I loved books, for instance, then I wouldn’t own at least a…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs have been talking about the future of reading and literature, which leads me to believe that they don’t think it’s dead. I don’t believe them. The sad truth is that they’re taking Reading Rainbow away…
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The Limits of Narrative
In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out whether a prospective choice “led to the treasure in the…