the Great Depression
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An Investigation into Fate and Freedom: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Everyone, no matter how strong or independent, is subject to forces like war, or time, or the claims of family.
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What They Never Told Me, What I Never Asked: Reflecting on Roots and Writing
[T]he questions pile up, never to be answered.
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The New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: Rick DesRochers and Ian Gordon
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
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Saul Bellows Revived
Saul Bellow’s 1978 story “A Silver Dish“ has been has been re-released over at the New Yorker. The piece follows Woody Seblst, a successful businessman, before abandoning its conventional plot structure entirely; Bellow’s prose seeps into the Great Depression, the rise…
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How the Paperback Saved Civilization
With America gripped by the Great Depression, booksellers found that $2.75 put hardcover books out of reach for most readers. (A movie ticket then cost just 20 cents.) In 1939, with a full-page ad in the New York Times and…
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The Rumpus Interview with James Vance
We talk to James Vance about the Great Depression, creeping pessimism, and the challenges of exploring these subjects in comics form in his new graphic novel On the Ropes.
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On Elegance
I have a theory that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private sadness, and that good taste and impeccable manners are life’s consolation. Perhaps they conjure sprezzatura, the Renaissance ideal of artful nonchalance, that makes it all conceivable.
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Like a Pack of Alaskan Dogs
“Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant. San Francisco. ‘I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men.…