The Page 40 Test

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But by paying close attention to how a writer constructs sentences, we can begin to see how the larger structure of the novel is built.
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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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A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

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Meyer spent five years researching and writing The Son, reading some 300 books on Texas, teaching himself how to hunt with a bow, and shooting a buffalo so he could experience what it was like to drink its blood.
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Just Try and Stop Me: Jane Smiley Sets Her Sights on the American Century

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The idea for the trilogy, Smiley says, arose in part out of her fury over the political situation in the U.S. since the Bush Administration and a desire to understand “how the country got where it is today.”
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Magical Thinking: Talent and the Cult of Craft

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As creative writing education continues to expand from a narrow field pursued by a devoted few to a profitable industry employing thousands, perhaps we should pause a moment to reflect on precisely what is being sold and what assumptions underlie the transaction.
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It’s 2014, Do You Know Where You Are? Bright Lights, Big City at 30

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The voice at the center of Bright Lights may be spoiled and petulant, but it also is unmistakably American: fatally romantic, distrustful of authority, and democratic to a fault, even as it sounds its barbaric yawp over the rooftop parties of the world.
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Her Body, Herself: On Dylan Landis’s Rainey Royal

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There are the makings of an explosive novel here, but Landis, having set the bomb in place and struck the match, declines to light the fuse.
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A Vanished World of Readers: On Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year

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A less-heralded casualty of the digital age is the disintegration of the lower rungs of the ladder that have long led young, smart readers into the caste of professional tastemakers.
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Betting on Quality: On One Story Collected

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If One Story Collected is a stethoscope to the heart of contemporary American fiction, the news is good: despite a run of economic shocks to the publishing industry, the muscle that pumps fresh blood into the system is still beating like a tom-tom.
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Nathaniel P. Gets the Fanfic Treatment: On Adelle Waldman’s “New Year’s”

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Everyone has had a close relationship that works better as a friendship than as a romance, and at some half-drunken moment of intimacy, everyone has wondered why. “New Year’s” seems a story poised to answer this very human question, and then, for some reason, it simply doesn’t.
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Screens on the Subway: The Rolling Library Is Going Digital

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When we talk about books, we tend to think in terms of great works of art and forget that for most people books, like newspapers and magazines, are merely a handy thing to have around for that idle moment when there isn’t something else better to do. Now those idle moments are being filled by screens.
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A Story is Worth a Thousand Data Points: Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys

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Surely, high-frequency trading is more complicated than the Manichean portrait of it Lewis draws of it in Flash Boys, but if he hadn’t found a way to boil down this highly technical issue to an emotionally satisfying tale of good vs. evil, most of us would never have known it existed.
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Filling the Silences: Race, Poetry, and the Digital-Media Megaphone

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For most white Americans born outside the South, the Civil Rights Movement is the stuff of history books — fascinating, but abstract. For people like Taylor and myself, whose families were profoundly shaped by the civil rights struggle before we were born, that turbulent era is acutely personal, and at the same time distant and exotic.
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Getting With the Program: On MFA vs. NYC

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What was clearly intended as a series of artsy-smartsy essays examining the state of play in literary America too often comes off as an extended moan of self-pity from a once-cosseted corner of Brownstone Brooklyn.
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Like, OMG! ‘Like’ Is, Like, Totally Cool, Linguist Says

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There used to be a time when my story might have been: ‘I saw her enter the room and I was terrified that she would recognize me and so I crouched down.’ Which is actually sort of boring. But now you can tell that as: ‘I saw her, and I was like, oh my god! I was like, what if she sees me? I was like, oh my god, I’ve gotta hide. I was like, what am I supposed to say to her?’
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Fear Not, English Is Safe From ‘Satisfries’

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What may seem like a frontal attack standard written English is in fact something quite different: a rise of a new public language heavily influenced by oral speech that, supercharged by online and television discourse, does much of the actual persuading in modern life while leaving standard, university-taught English unscathed.
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Hipster Noir: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt Novels

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In Claire DeWitt, Sara Gran has given the hard-boiled detective a good, hard hipster twist, creating a character with a savagely vigilant mind and a black heart always on the verge of breaking.
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A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

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The Orenda sheds new light on the dark crime at the heart of all North American history, but more important than that, it renders the ostensible victims of that crime, the Indians, as complex, fully realized human beings.
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