Devoutly to Be Wished: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Consummation

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With astounding single-mindedness (or monomania, if you prefer), Knausgaard has pursued a writing project that both consumes him and sequesters him from life. He’s Ahab, only he’s gone and caught the whale.
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A Forgotten Bestseller: The Saga of John Williams’s Stoner

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What is the story of Stoner? How does an American book first published in 1965 go on to become a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013?
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Goodbye, Maxwell’s: On the Demise of Hoboken and Places Like It

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Nostalgic locals are replaced by the hipster vanguard; the hipster vanguard is replaced again. To the young newcomers who didn’t grow up here, there’s little reason to care: Hoboken is said to boast more bars per capita than any other American city.
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Bearing the Burden: The Moral Cost of a Professional Army

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Fire and Forget, written by veterans (and one Army wife), stands as the best fictional account of the wars of the last decade and the contemporary military experience, and as such, is utterly damning of the devil’s bargain the nation and its military have entered into.
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Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?

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Kindle Worlds might seem like a vast step up for your average fanfic writer, the best of whom are paid in praise alone. If it didn’t feel like such a fundamental and remotely insulting misunderstanding of fan culture, if it didn’t feel like a prime chance for corporations to exploit rather than promote, I might even praise Amazon.
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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

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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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George Saunders and the Question of Greatness

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The hype surrounding George Saunders's Tenth of December in the early days of the calendar year was kind of staggering. The backlash followed not long afterwards, when it was suggested that someone who can’t seem to accrue enough pages to pen the Great American Novel couldn’t actually be considered the writer of our time. This makes me cringe -- maybe because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.
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Still Merry and Bright? Rethinking Henry Miller

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Few possess Miller's courage, his willingness to walk away from the American dream and embrace a life without hope. Fewer still manage to be what Miller claimed to be in the face of hopelessness – always merry and bright.
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The Black and the White: Maus and the Art Spiegelman Exhibit

Born from universal ideas, crafted by the hands of artists, written with passion, the comic strip has become the medium for narratives that can be read again and again and images that can be stared at pensively in the hushed space of a museum.

The Superhero Factory: An Unauthorized Corporate History of Marvel Comics

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Sean Howe covers the entire history of Marvel, from 1939 to Disney’s acquisition of the company 70 years later. The book has few heroes and villains, only figures who, with varying degrees of success and failure, negotiate the politics of a large enterprise for their own wants and needs. It’s a portrait of what capitalism can create and what it can’t create -- and what it can destroy.
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So That If I Died It Mattered

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When asked to explain my choices, I’ve said, “Art is how you explain what it feels like to be alive in the 21st century. I am an emotional historian.” But that’s really my answer to, “Why should we all make art?” My why is more personal.
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On the Fall of the House of Orwell

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Orwell’s birth home has languished in dilapidation for decades. Damaged by an earthquake in 1934, it deteriorated into a derelict building that stray animals sheltered in at night or during inclement weather. The homeless also used it; it became a place for people to gather to drink and gamble.
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James Salter’s All That Is: From Dream to Reality

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This is not George Saunders or Lorrie Moore making fun of the ineffectualness of romantic impulses; this is for real.
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The Book That Didn’t Break Out and the Disease That Did

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While I’d been planning, pushing, and preparing for my book launch, mutated white blood cells in my daughter’s body had been stealthily multiplying, on a mission to crowd her healthy blood cells out of her marrow and her bloodstream completely. But their success, unlike my book’s, was inevitable.
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Say Goodbye to the Play-by-Play Book Review

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In an increasingly digital world, literary critics need to become less like play-by-play announcer Joe Buck and more like color commentator Tim McCarver.
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Rachel Kushner Is Well On Her Way to Huge

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It was only when Kushner started writing her book that she made a discovery that is vital to any novelist trying to spin fiction out of historical events: the great danger is emptying your notebook, becoming lulled by your research into forgetting that novels are, first and last, works of the imagination.
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Less Mo Yan, More Ah Cheng

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Fans of Chinese literature all have their personal favorites, and none of them have ever resonated with me. I think I like Ah Cheng because he is crazy, and crazy people transcend the cultures that produce them.
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The Wisdom of Crowds: Reddit, Twitter, and the Hunt for the Wrong Man

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Thursday night’s abhorrent online vigilantism — in which Reddit and Twitter users seized upon police radio chatter to accuse a missing (and completely innocent) Brown University student of bombing the Boston Marathon — reminded us of one of the most under-acknowledged facts of the internet: that beyond the sleek, profitable edifices of Web 2.0 there remains the humming, virtual presence of an online crowd that is restive, unpredictable, and hungry for a cause.
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