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The Novel Still Exists: The Millions Interviews Don DeLillo
I don’t own a cell phone. I was just discussing this with the people I’m traveling with here, people from my publishers. I simply feel more comfortable without these things. But one feels it and sees it. It’s been around me for much of the day today, because the people I’m traveling with, one in particular has trouble with her cell phone. There’s something wrong with it. She doesn’t know who’s trying to get in touch with her, what it is they want to say to her.
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Cogs in an Enormous Machine: The Millions Interviews Paul Murray
I don't know of any profession where you experience failing as consistently and unambiguously as writing.
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A Year in Reading: Mark O’Connell
Let me tell you, I read seven shades of shit out of Peck Peck Peck, a delightfully illustrated picaresque romp about a baby woodpecker who goes around pecking a lot of household items under the tutelage of his father, also a woodpecker, before finally settling down to sleep.
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A Year in Reading: Mark O’Connell
“No, no, no,” I mutter to my former self. “Believe you me, pal, you don’t know shit about not reading. But you’re about to learn. Stick around another few months, then we’ll talk about not reading.”
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It’s a Mixed Life: An Interview with Nicholson Baker
Obama’s administration has been a devastating disappointment, in so many different ways. Fanatical secrecy, the persecution of whistleblowers, foreign interventions and arms shipments that make things worse, the quintupling of drone killings -- it just has to be said.
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Some Words About Wordlessness
There’s something about a six-month-old’s wordless interactions with the world that brings to mind the simple truth that a human is an animal.
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Not Really a Book About Trains As Such: Tim Parks’s Italian Ways
And despite all Parks’s entertaining kvetching about the excessive chattiness of fellow passengers and the gratuitous complexities of the ticketing system, Italian Ways is unmistakably an expression of love for his adopted country and its people. The close confinement of the train compartment becomes a metaphor for a society, in all the ways it does and does not work.
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Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: A Necessarily Ill-Informed Argument for Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth as the Funniest Book Ever Written
Here’s how funny it is: It’s funnier than A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s funnier than Money or Lucky Jim. It beats Shalom Auslander to a bloody, chuckling pulp with his own funny-bone. It is certainly the funniest book I’ve ever read.
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Literature as Self-Defense: An Interview with James Lasdun
In 2003, Lasdun taught a course in creative writing at a college in New York. His most gifted student was an Iranian-born woman in her early 30s. They emailed back and forth, and an online friendship began to develop. The book is an exploration of the effects of this relationship turning sour. Give Me Everything You Have is a harrowing account of what it’s like to have someone expend a great deal of time and energy on the project of damaging your life for no immediately obvious reason.
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A Year in Reading (And Not): Mark O’Connell
I'm always buying books on the basis that they are exactly the books I should be reading, while knowing that the likelihood of my ever starting them, let alone finishing them, is vanishingly small. I have no idea how many works of academic literary criticism I have bought on this basis, but it is, I fear, a number approaching shitloads.
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Infographics of Despair: Chris Ware’s Building Stories
Only bad art is depressing; good art, no matter what its subject, is exhilarating.
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Double Take: A Momentary Encounter With a Murderer and his Fictional Likeness
One evening a couple of weeks ago, I passed a murderer in the front square of Trinity College Dublin. It was Malcolm MacArthur, a man in his late sixties who spent the last thirty years in prison for killing two strangers in July of 1982. He is arguably the most notorious murderer in Ireland’s notoriously murderous history.
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A Martin Amis Hatchet Job? On Lionel Asbo: State of England
The Martin Amis Hatchet Job is, at this point, a sort of minor literary genre in its own right. As a rule, the reviewer will mention at least one (but preferably many more) of the following list of topics: misogyny; Islamophobia; dentistry; patrician contempt for the working classes; sonship of Kingsley; mentorship of Bellow; friendship of Hitchens; enmity of Barnes and/or Eagleton; earliness of success; velvetness of trousers.
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On Point: David Rees, The Proust of Pencil Sharpeners
I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”
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Cool Story, Bro: The Provocations of John D’Agata
To say The Lifespan of a Fact is mostly boring is a bit like saying that a Molotov cocktail is mostly boring because it’s just a bottle of petrol with an old rag stuffed into it.
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