Staff Pick: China Mieville’s Embassytown

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Instead of doing the safe thing and revisiting his imaginary world of Bas-Lag or his reconfigured city of London, Mieville now takes us to his titular "city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe."
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The Indigenous American Berserk

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Whenever there are bright lights, clusters of cameras and microphones, spin doctors and handlers, packs of hungry rivals with notebooks, the writer's chances of getting something genuine, or even merely unique, shrink monstrously.  I experienced this so many times that it is one of the few things I absolutely know to be true.
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Will Ferrell Channels Raymond Carver — And It Works!

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The 10th Tribeca Film Festival was a richly musical affair. Nearly lost in this pleasing din were two quiet movies, a feature and a documentary, that grew, respectively, out of a work of literature and the misguided urge to lionize writers.
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Our Growing Higher Ed Crisis: Making Myths In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

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Professor X knows first-hand that if you refuse to keep score, if you don't set standards, if you promote students simply for trying, you will produce mediocrity, or worse. But don't just take his word for it.
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Are Run-On Subtitles Literature’s New Flop Sweat?

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Suddenly, every time I walked into a bookstore or read a review, I started noticing similarly breathless subtitles. What had struck me initially as the odd unfortunate decision now began to look like a full-blown trend.
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Is Copyright a Guardian Angel or a Killer of Creativity? A Conversation with Alfred Steiner

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In the art world when one artist copies another artist, it only helps the artist being copied.
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Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse

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Grief, all of a sudden, is hot.  Books by authors who have lost a loved one are becoming so common they're now a classifiable snowflake in the unending blizzard of memoirs.
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To Blurb or Not to Blurb?

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This seemingly innocent question was put to me for the first time a couple of weeks ago when a paperback review copy of a non-fiction book arrived in my mailbox.
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Staff Pick: Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live

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It's a ripping story, splashed with bloody horrors and punctuated by moments of serene beauty.
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Jay-Z is Not a Proudhon of Hip-Hop

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All art comes from art.  To admit this is not to concede that there's no such thing as originality any more than it's a license to borrow without attribution and then call it your own. 
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When We Aspire to Write Like Ourselves: A Conversation with Carl H. Klaus

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I wanted to see if I could create literary non-fiction out of short-term memory.
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Will You Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet, Please?

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The army of Beat hagiographers operates under the illusion that dissecting the personal lives of writers is essential to – even preferable to – understanding their writing.
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