writing
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Writing, Getting Fired and Resume-Building
“I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian…
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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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Point of View and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Flexible First Person
We spend an enormous amount of our lives … thinking about other people, their motives, their desires and their opinions.
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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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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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In a World Without Taboos (We’d Just Be Jerking Off)
“When, they ask, are things going to get dirty again? “If you want an answer to that question, ladies and gentlemen, let me propose one. In 2010, the only sex that’s truly dangerous and unbounded is solitary.” In response to…
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Please Read the Letter That I Wrote
Starved for funds, the United States Postal Service recently considered cutting its mail delivery service down to five-days a week–not a huge surprise considering their losses over the last couple of years and the fact that Americans are relying more…
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The Hurdles Of Rejection
“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often works. One of the reasons I started the Q & A…
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Show Me More Funny Books Please
“But there is another issue, too: one for which you can’t blame publishers or booksellers. The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. “It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires…
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The Strange World of Shirley Jackson
“Shirley and Stanley lived with their children and 30,000 books in a rambling Victorian house near the post office in the village where Shirley had so memorably set her classic 1948 short story, ‘The Lottery.’ “Shirley did the family driving,…
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“The pulp of 2010”
Jonah Lehrer laments a big problem with the social web: “The one shared feature that I’m most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn’t just let us…
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The Heroic Return of the Baffler
After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned! I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine…