The Millions
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Your Future in Books
The Millions came out with the “Great Second-Half of 2011 Book Preview,” which includes 66 titles and tons of accompanying words describing them (most books are forthcoming, some came out this month). First on the list is last month’s Rumpus…
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Why Fiction?
Why do people (with some notable exceptions) continue to read literary fiction in our rather tenuous literary culture? The Millions’ Jon Baskin reviews Timothy Aubry’s Reading as Therapy, which tackles this question. Examining American reading habits, Aubry teases out the…
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Those Presumptuous Blurbs
How do you pare down a novel into a pithy, attractive two-to-three word sentence? Nobody has really mastered the art of the back cover blurb and many esteemed literary figures have had their work inaccurately summarized and oversimplified to fit…
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Choosing Words Carefully
The Millions posted an essay on the eternal writer’s dilemma to craft the perfect book and the elusive nature of perfectionism. For writers, readers or anybody with compulsive tendencies, choosing to dedicate time to a book is a difficult decision.…
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Considering the Short Story
For all the short story readers and writers out there—this Millions essay considers the ups and downs of short story publishing and their synchronistic decline with the mass market magazine readership. There are some illuminating stats on Americans’ short story…
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Teens, Malls, Petty Crime
John Brandon, author of Arkansas and Citrus County, reminisces about the petty crime/literary conquests of his adolescence at The Millions. After his teenage athleticism burned out, he funneled his energy into consuming and stealing books from the Gulf View Square…
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Eugenides Teaser
Jeffrey Eugenides, who has never written a novel that wasn’t well-received, has a new title called The Marriage Plot coming out in October, eight years since everybody first loved Middlesex. October may seem like forever away, but fortunately The Millions…
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Troublesome Tomes
“When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow […] there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to…
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Dyer On Reader’s Block
“If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad…
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The Millions “A Year In Reading”
Don’t miss it! The Millions “A Year In Reading” is underway with contributions from John Banville and Lionel Shriver, among others.
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The Millions On Creeps
Invoking theorists Helen Cixous and Avital Ronell, The Millions tackles a recent favorite of mine: The Orange Eats Creeps. (I particuarly like this turn of phrase from Ronell: “they rerouted the hunting grounds of the cannibalistic libido.”)
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The Millions Tackles Dhalgren
I harp endlessly about my favorite things, one of which is Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, which I harped about before on the Rumpus. And now The Millions has joined the chorus, as Garth Hallberg ponders the ambiguities and joys…