the new yorker
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All of the Above
Over at the New Yorker, Alejandro Zambra has a piece of post-fiction prose from his collection Facsímil; it’s a parody on the entire notion of education. Read Zambra’s thoughts on the piece, and the collection, here.
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Sonnets and Songs
“All good love songs are sad,” Paul McCartney, who knew, once told this reporter. The mystery is that while what we want is love fulfilled, what we actually feel most deeply about is love frustrated. What do Shakespeare’s love sonnets…
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The Families Who Tried to Save Five Hostages
Diane came and hugged me and said, ‘Father, please pray for me that I don’t become bitter. I don’t want to hate.’ For the New Yorker, Lawrence Wright provides a detailed and heart-wrenching account of the people who came together to try…
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Mis Documentos
Over at the New Yorker, James Wood chronicles Alejandro Zambra’s ascent in Latin American letters.
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How to Fill Your Literary Prescription and Cure Your Existential Ailments
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of…
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Examining Culture
Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its…
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Do Governments Make Bad Editors?
When the Chinese government created a China-themed pavilion at this year’s BookExpo America, several writers protested the event. Writer Andrew Solomon argued that the Chinese government used that expo as a platform to present their “approved literature to the world.”…
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Who Still Reads Alice in Wonderland?
For the New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Robert Douglas Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice, tracing the cultural importance of the “peppery briskness” of Lewis Carroll’s words.
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Urban Escape
Of course Zadie Smith’s written a science fiction epic, set on September 11, 2001, chronicling the haphazard relationship between Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. And of course it’s based on a true story, or at least an urban…
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Living in the Republic
The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the…
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The World of Mommy Bloggers
Mommy blogging has not, of course, been a panacea, remedying women’s undervaluation. In keeping with certain political ideals of the time, the Wages for Housework campaign sought to redistribute wealth more fairly. Mommy blogging, by contrast, offers rewards that only…
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Trolloping through Modern Life
Adam Gopnik on Anthony Trollope and his relevance to modern life: Trollope, quite uncynically, understands both what’s necessary to make the world go round and which way the world ought to be made to turn. The Palliser books have a…