Essays Notable Articles

The Art of the Final Sentence

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For writers, the last sentences aren’t about reader responsibility at all -- it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to stop worrying about what comes next, because nothing does. No more keeping the reader interested, no more wariness over giving the game away. This is the best time for a writer to get real, to depict reality as they see it, without compromises, without fear.
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Essays Notable Articles

The Art of the Chapter

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You want to know how weird and deep my rabbit hole goes? I’ve developed what I’ll call an eccentricity about chapters.
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Essays

Let Us Now Praise Authors, Artists, Dilettantes, and Drunks

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I ask myself, in what Kyoto bar might a fellow literary pilgrim relate to me the praiseworthy sexual longevity of one of Japan's great dilettante artists?
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Essays

An Emotional History of Chocolate

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Like the ocean closing over Manhattan or countrywide droughts, a world where chocolate is entirely rare -- or entirely mediocre -- is a dystopia the likes of which we can scarcely conceive.
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Essays

An Eye to the Edges: On Other Stories

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It’s frustrating sometimes, for many of us, to be reminded of the stories that matter apart from our own and that we might be complicit in pushing them out to the margins.
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Essays

Honey, Would You Read My Book?

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The transaction is fraught with expectation and fear, hope and anxiety. If it goes badly, the simple offer of pages to read can shake relationships, unsettle marriages, and open wide rifts between partners, lovers, friends.
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Essays

Born Out of Rapt Distraction: On Silvina Ocampo’s ‘Thus Were Their Faces’

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On a moment-to-moment basis the terms of the continued existence of any individual are far more fragile than we dare to feel.
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Essays

I Would Do This for You: The Narrative Possibilities of Leaked Emails

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Pascal and Rudin's emails, which are basically incomprehensible to anyone outside of their industry, are somehow more compelling by virtue of their incomprehensibility, Amy Pascal’s sibylline utterances full of a surprising sort of illiterate pathos and mystery.
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Essays

Summer Without End

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The habitual aspect may be the antidote to anxiety. But patterns finish. The rhythm ends in grief. The grooves betray.
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Essays Notable Articles

It’s Not You, It’s Us: Apartment Hunting in Brooklyn

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I couldn’t really picture myself living here. But I tried anyway. I had a premonition of standing in the middle of a pretty-decent sized kitchen, sautéing garlic shrimp for my blow-up girlfriend.
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Essays

Is ‘Jesus’ Son’ a ‘Red Cavalry’ Rip-Off?

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What does Denis Johnson mean by calling his most iconic book a “rip-off” of 'Red Cavalry'? In terms of locations and circumstances, the books are radically different. But, on closer look, they actually do share a lot in common.
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Essays

A World Made of Words: On Anthony Doerr’s Nouns and Verbs

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Twenty-one words, three simple clauses, and wham, you are there.
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Essays

Biography: The Incredible Expanding Form

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Nowadays, human beings are no longer the sole suitable subjects for a biography, which is coming to mean an account of just about anything’s life, or history, or essence.
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Essays

You’re (Not) My Favorite

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Favorites -- either being them or having them -- were for suckers. Favorites were out.
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Essays

Glad Hall: On the Cycles of Home

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Houses hold memories -- even if not all of them are good ones. They hold the life of a family -- its beginnings, its end.
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Essays

Alive with Disagreement and Dissent: On A.O. Scott, Politics, and Art

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It is natural to hope, even if that hope is somewhat against the weight of experience, that artists can light the path ahead.
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Essays

Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living

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I am not a writer first. I have a family, and without them I would have little reason to want to write -- or to do anything else. My desire to create is held in silence during the day, so that my literary moments can be focused and absolute.
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Essays

The Impediments of Style: Advice from Steven Pinker and the CIA

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Pinker is on a mission to remove the heckling usage purists from the back of the linguistics classroom.
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