On Bad Reviews

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Given all the years you spent writing your book or composing your music or perfecting your play before someone came along and spat on it, it’s extraordinarily difficult to respond to a bad review with grace.
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Saving Salinger

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“The Last and Best of the Peter Pans” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” have never been published in the nearly sixty years since Salinger wrote them.  Princeton’s Firestone Library now protects the only known copies.
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The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis

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The rhythm of school is conducive to the writing of small things, not big things, and we don't try hard enough to think beyond that rhythm because, for many of us, it’s the only rhythm we know.
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Most Anticipated: The Great 2011 Book Preview

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8,000 words strong and encompassing 76 titles, it's the only 2011 book preview you will ever need.
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A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson

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It's the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible.
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A Year in Reading: Ed Champion (The 13 Most Underrated Books of 2010)

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2010 was a great year in books!  This was a hard list to assemble!
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The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B.R. Myers

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And so he whirled mirthlessly on, flourishing the word "prose" like a magic wand, working pale variations on his "Reader's Manifesto." In your face, Jonathan Franzen!
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What We Teach When We Teach Writers: On the Quantifiable and the Uncertain

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“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
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The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter

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Sad but true, the rejection letter, like so many things in book publishing, is a shadow of what it used to be.
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Gratuitous: How Sexism Threatens to Undermine the Internet

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I like following Lisa's blog because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling. Following it is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone's daily life). She's my Jersey Shore.
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Stieg Larsson: Swedish Narcissus

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In any other book, I would see these tactics as pandering to the baser instincts of the reading public. But in this book, in which Mikael is so obviously a stand-in for Stieg, it's just tacky. Especially since this Stieg/Mikael amalgamation has also appointed himself head of the Respecting Women Committee.
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Is Big Back?

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A mini-boom in big books would seem to complicate our assumptions about the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.
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Again, I Ask: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?

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The next time you’re in the supermarket, inspect a box of Alpha-Bits. What you’ll find in that milk-splashed bowl will shake you to your core.
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Tough Love: A Review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

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With 2001's The Corrections, Franzen would seem to have perfected his maximalist method. What might it mean to say that his new novel, Freedom, finds him maturing?
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Where We Write: The Merits of Making Do

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I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one. Somewhere along the way, I began to work in libraries. More important, I began to get work done in libraries.
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The Franzen Cover and a Brief History of Time

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A look at Time's 83 literary coverboys and -girls reveals a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we'd describe as Franzean.
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Writing Is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin

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First gunshot of the day, 8:42 a.m. Lesson relearned by the end of the day: nonfiction book proposals are hell. Very long walk followed by tequila.
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