The Trojan Horse Problem: Thoughts on Structure

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I think it’s fair to say that I adore a fairly wide range of styles and structural ideas, and yet one thing that I’m consistently troubled by is what I’ve come to think of as the Trojan Horse novel: the book that’s structured as a delivery system for something entirely unrelated to the plot.
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Through the Looking Glass: Notes on Disappearance

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People don’t disappear nearly as often in real life as they do in fiction. We’re fascinated, as a culture, by the idea of vanishing.
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Brooklyn Underdog: Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

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Shoeshine Cats is admirable in part for its tinge of the improbable, its impossible suavité and secret rooms. Kestin catches us up in a gritty enchantment.
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Every Day The Same Dream

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Even aside from the sad beauty of the game’s gray world, I was thinking about it the other day and I realized part of its appeal: it reminds me, in its very existence, of what the Internet used to be.
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The Music in My Head

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A while ago I began wondering if I might use music to my advantage somehow. Because if music exerts the sway over us that I think it does, I might use it to help me ignore the distractions of the outside world.
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Writing in Trains

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My subway writing habit began a few months ago, in the feverish time around the publication of my first novel.
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel

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Shaun Tan’s suburbia is a haunted place, sometimes banal and sometimes beautiful, populated by strange apparitions—a water buffalo who lives in a vacant lot and gives directions to children in need
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Working the Double Shift

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The phrase 'day job,' of course, implies that one’s passions lie elsewhere.
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