On Nature Writing in a Filthy World

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Purdy’s broader point is key: Whatever this genre, “nature writing” has made a comeback, just as more complicated works of un-nature sit beside them.
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The Failure Artist: Writing Bullshit, Getting Rejected, and Keeping at It

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Failing to sell my book killed the part of me that still believed I was going to be a famous writer. To my astonishment, this realization set me free.
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On Saying: Finding the Language to Describe Chronic Pain

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“I still want you to tell me what’s going on with your body,” my friend Cailey says. “But why,” I ask her, “when there’s nothing certain to say?”
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The Torture Box: A Critical Look at Flannery O’Connor and Her Disproportionate Retributions

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There is something horribly comic in the experience of reading an O’Connor story. It is awful, and it is funny, and it is funny because it’s awful.
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We Should All Be Reading Ancient Poetry Right Now

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Read the classical poets not for escapism but for the reverse: They found the words to express the dark spots we’re still facing today.
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NYC’s Difficult to Name Reading Series Ends with Screenwriting Tips, Mid-Aughts Angst, Drake Takes

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I asked Sartor what this institution of the New York literary scene has meant to him: “Sitting down and listening to people read is like the joy for me.”
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On the Imperialist ‘Charity’ of Rebuilding Caribbean Children’s Libraries with Eurocentric Books

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Caribbean countries have essentially become a kind of clearinghouse for rich-nation publishers and booksellers; it can rightly be called "donation dumping."
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Indulging in the Sweet Sorrow of Melancholy

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This is melancholy’s truth. It is both blessing and curse, boon and bane: an ever-persistent struggle between sweet and sour, joy and sorrow.
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Exposing Murder Rings and the Realities of McCarthyism: A Deep Dive into FOIA

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As I scrolled through, my sense of the light in the room shifted. My pulse quickened. I felt like I was getting something for my democracy.
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50 Years Ago, Kingsley Amis Had a Midlife Crisis and Turned to James Bond for Help

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007 was the right hero for the right author. If Bond could defeat SPECTRE and SMERSH, surely he could help a 40-something bloke get back on his feet again?
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A Day in the Life of an Indie Publisher: Akashic Books

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Most novels sell only a few thousand copies, and at a big house those writers wind up feeling like a failure. It’s much easier for us to have a success.
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Unseasonal Reading: Enjoying Books as They Come

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Although I have read more than last year already, I find myself perplexed by my slowness. Has my attention span shortened from using a phone too often?
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A Mad Woman on Fire: On Sylvia Plath and Female Rage

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What mattered was that I—this well-behaved, compliant young woman—was writing from deeper, darker places, reservoirs of anger I’d always denied were there.
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Playing with Guns: Parenting in the Age of the Active Shooter

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We could so easily get guns. We felt cool playing with them, drinking cheap beer in the desert. How dangerous that this kind of gunplay seems innocent now.
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On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing

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In an era of illiterate racist YouTube comments, to worry about semicolons seeming overly sophisticated would be splitting a hair that no longer exists.
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After the Welfare State: Kathy Acker and the American Health Care System

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“I sit in chair. I hurt.” The scene is shocking and ordinary, disturbing and workaday. It is one of thousands that occurred in New York alone in the 1970s.
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The Problem with Patriotism: A Critical Look at Collective Identity in the U.S. and Germany

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It’s the bulwark of national identity we cling to, even if this identity is precisely what clouds our cognitive faculties most.
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Baby Steps All the Way: Making the Time to Write a Book

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This is not how I thought books were written when I was a young person dreaming of becoming a writer, or when I was a student learning about other writers.
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