R.I.P: Select Literary Obituaries from 2015

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Rest in Peace. Through your words you will all live on.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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This year brought forth another crop of terrific books about the D, as we Detroiters refer to our beloved, beleaguered hometown.
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The Filmable Miss Highsmith

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What is it that keeps drawing filmmakers to the fiction of Patricia Highsmith?
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How the West Was Lost

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In the end, Ivan Doig & Co. come to very different conclusions about How the West Was Lost, but they share a sense that the loss is as irreversible as it was wrong-headed.
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Is Experience Overrated? One Writer’s Checkered Résumé

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If I wanted to become a novelist, according to Flannery O’Connor, I didn’t need to wander the world harvesting experiences. I needed to contemplate experience and then write about it.
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Love in the Ruins: On Matt Bell’s ‘Scrapper’

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Maybe the finest thing about 'Scrapper' is the way in takes us into a deep-pore underworld that’s rarely explored in even the best books about Detroit.
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How Iceberg Slim Schooled Dr. Dre: On Justin Gifford’s ‘Street Poison’

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Iceberg Slim, brutal pimp turned popular author, received a fraction of the royalties due him -- which meant, ironically, that he ended up getting pimped by his own publisher.
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Car Crush: Why American Writers and Artists Can’t Stop Loving the Automobile

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Is there any more potent metaphor for the American tendency to wind up, broken and bloody, in a ditch?
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Let Us Now Be Grateful That They’re (Finally!) (Honestly!) (Really Really Really!) Dead

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The Grateful Dead’s final tour is another reminder that the band long ago became a large corporation with a bottom line to consider. That’s not a knock on their success. It’s just a fact.
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Dynamite Detroit Debut: On Angela Flournoy’s ‘The Turner House’

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There are many sentences in 'The Turner House' that nail a sense of place with a precision long-time Detroiters like Elmore Leonard or Donald Goines would have envied.
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Four Uneasy Pieces: How Detroit Moved Beyond Ruin Porn

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The facile visual shorthand of ruin porn has eclipsed nuanced narrative as a way of telling the complex story of Detroit.
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Down in the Oedipal Mud: On Kent Russell’s ‘I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son’

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Kent Russell, like John Jeremiah Sullivan, never adopts the let’s-laugh-at-the-Clampetts pose common to inferior writers of inferior non-fiction.
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Cuba on the Cusp in ‘Havana Motor Club’

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Cubans are getting ready to navigate a treacherous crossroads -- the place where communism and capitalism intersect and collide.
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What the New Whitney Museum Says About the New New York City

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The new Whitney is the latest monument to contemporary New York’s get-rich-or-get-out ethos.
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Ink on Paper: On the Beauty of Typewritten Book Covers

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The reason these typewritten book covers have caught my eye and captured my heart is because they’ve so ingeniously captured the essence of the writing process -- and the central truth that no piece of writing is ever truly finished.
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Will All You Literary Biographers Please Be Quiet, Please?

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Here’s a modest proposal: Let’s outlaw the literary biography.
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The Civil Rights Movement Finally Gets Its Hollywood Close-Up

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'Selma' is the climax of a cinematic crescendo that has been building for years.
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Rejoice! A Hollywood Screenwriter Read a Novel Last Year!

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I’m happy to report that the writers nominated for the Adapted Screenplay Oscar mixed a little fiction into their reading diets last year. A very little. One novel.
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