A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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This has been my year of reading genre-ously.
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The Last Pen Pal

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While mankind strives to improve itself to death, some of us want no part of it.
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Elmore Leonard Knows What to Leave Out of Djibouti

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Walker Percy was a big Elmore Leonard fan.  Way back in 1987, during the high noon of a career that has now reached its rich and plummy twilight, Percy asked: "Why is Elmore Leonard so good?"  Percy answered: "He doesn't stick to the same guy in the same place."
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Gay Talese’s The Silent Season of a Hero is Sports Writing That’s Destined to Last

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Even more fascinating to Talese than failure is the murky downslope of greatness, the twilight of storied careers, the ways stars must struggle to get their bearings after the cheering stops.
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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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James Ross and The Agony of the One-Hit Wonder

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James Ross published just one novel in his lifetime.  This is a rare thing because of a paradox that lies at the heart of novel writing: it demands such sustained focus, such persistence, so much raw pig-headed stubbornness that anyone who does it once almost invariably does it again.
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Carla Cohen, You Will Be Missed

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The secret of the store's success has been that the owners loved books and weren't afraid to have opinions or share them with their customers.  And the customers responded to that passion.
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William Gibson’s Zero History Has A Smirk On Every Page

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Gibson has always been fascinated by fashion, not only as an expression of personal style, but as a place where technology and advertising work together, on a global scale, to create and feed human appetites in the name of corporate profits.
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Does School Kill Writing?

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School wasn't my death as a writer, it was my birth; and it would not have happened without the guidance and support of inspiring teachers, access to magnificent libraries, and every student's most precious gift, free time.
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Scattered Out Over the Land: A Southern Hamlet Crawling with Writers

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Greensboro, North Carolina, is that true American anomaly – a place where there seem to be more people writing serious books than reading them.
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A Curmudgeon on Two Wheels: The Bike Snob Book

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Bicycles seem to be saying more about us every day – our politics, our social class, our tribal affiliation. In a word, our values. How is it possible for a simple 2-wheeled contraption to say so much?
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A Chiefest Pleasure: Discovering The Sot-Weed Factor on its 50th Birthday

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The deeper you go into your life and your reading, the more precious the long-overlooked gems become once you finally unearth them.
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The Happy Ghost

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Ghostwriting used to be book publishing's dirty little secret. No more. Today a growing cadre of writers are discovering that checking their ego at the door and telling someone else's story can make them very successful, very rich and, in at least one case, as close to happy as most writers will ever get.
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The Hipsterati

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"It was my dad's 60th birthday. We went out to dinner in Brooklyn and he looked around and said, 'Who are these people?' I told him they were hipsters. He asked if that was like hippies. No, I told him, the short answer is that they're grown-up babies."
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