the new york times
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“No, I’m the Narrator”
At The New York Times, author and Rumpus contributor Jami Attenberg writes about the the disorientation and fear that came when, after a break-up, her ex-boyfriend started a site about her. “Creating the blog might have been his grasp at…
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Just Friends
In recent months, we’ve had a couple top-notch essays about both the power and addictiveness of friendship. This weekend, at The New York Times,William Deresiewicz took up the topic, focusing on friendship “between the sexes.” Deresiewicz touches on the “surprisingly…
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Word Choices
At The New York Times, Constance Hale contributes a series of writing lessons. Her latest entry, “Desperately Seeking Synonyms,” zeroes in on the complexities of nouns. “The best writers combine killer nouns and adjectives, and they can make dawn —…
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“Read It and Weep”
At The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, revealing the “cumulative welling up” he experienced while reading. “…There’s nothing cloying about Wild. It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you…
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Charged Sentences
“It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving…
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Acts of Imagination
It is mildly surprising that the New York Times didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “My Debt to Ireland” as fit to print in its Sunday magazine on a date closer to March 17, and, actually, it’s sort of a…
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Life Under the City
This weekend, Anthony Horton died in a fire in a New York subway tunnel. Horton, who had made a home in the tunnels, was the co-author of Pitch Black, a graphic novel “based on his life underground.” The New York…
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Unreliable Narrators
In reviewing RENEGADE: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer,” Jeanette Winterson explores mythmaking in cultural criticism, unearthing who and what gets ignored in the process. “There is beauty as well as hatred in “Cancer,” and it deserves…
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Finding Quiet
“So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came…
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On Literary Adaptations
The New York Times dissects the advent of the novel to television adaptation with a focus on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Craig Fehram breaks down the differences between television and movie adaptations in arguing that “where…
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Praise for Damascus
“The author’s jaunty voice [is] Beat-poet cool…Mohr nails the atmosphere of a San Francisco still breathing in the smoke that lingers from the days of Jim Jones and Dan White, a time when passionate ideologies and personal dysfunction intermingled and…
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RIP George Whitman, Legendary Bookseller
George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore, passed away yesterday. Of his 98 years of life, 60 were devoted to his bookstore (the sister shop to San Francisco’s City Lights) described as an “offbeat mix…