Only Connect: A Young Playwright Finds His Audience

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The 200-odd Bronx high school students did not shut up for one single second once they entered the theater. Guys wolf-whistled at girls across the theater, and the girls hollered back, daring the boys to come down after them. Spitbombs flew. Paper airplanes sailed.
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Act Two: A Young Playwright Grows Up

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Moss Hart had talent, an inhuman tolerance for work, and a pair of brass balls, but what set him apart from the thousands of other guys hanging around theater lobbies in the mid-1920s trying to catch a break was that the man was fucking relentless.
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Beyond Alice Munro: A Beginner’s Guide to Canadian Lit

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For Americans who have plowed through Munro’s Selected Stories and are looking for a broader taste of Canadian literature — or CanLit, as it is called here — I offer a partial and admittedly idiosyncratic “Beginner’s Guide to Canadian Literature.”
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A Slingshot Full of Stories: Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath

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In David and Goliath, Gladwell appears to have started with an answer and then gone looking for people to prove him right.
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Breaking Good: Broadway’s Golden Age Reborn on Cable

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It seems clear that if Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry were writing today they would be showrunners for a cable series, because that’s where the audience is.
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Breaking the Mold: Can Jeff Bezos Save the Washington Post?

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Whatever you may think of Jeff Bezos and other tech innovators who broke the pre-Internet business model, the fact is the old model is broken – and who better to fix it than the man who helped break it in the first place?
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Pride and Privilege: On Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance

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A Dual Inheritance is that most pleasing of literary beasts: a novel of ideas wrapped up in a big, sudsy intergenerational saga of screwed-up families and soul-destroying love triangles.
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The Apple Antitrust Case and the Widgetification of Books

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It is easy to see the Apple antitrust suit as merely a clash between multi-billion-dollar corporations, but at heart the case asks a fundamental societal question: what, legally speaking, is art?
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“The Locked Room of Himself”: On Colm Tóibín’s The Master

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I have never cared so much about a character I liked so little.
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Up Shit Creek, Sans Paddle: On David Waltner-Toews’s The Origin of Feces

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The Origins of Feces is a genial book, and often a kick to read, but I put it down thinking two things: 1. I will never look at shit the same way again; and 2. We are in deep shit.
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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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Amazon Announces Purchase of English™

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Plans are also in the works to acquire German, Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese, Bezos said, as well as several nonstandard dialects of English™, including African-American Vernacular English, popular among the highly desirable 18-25 upscale suburban demographic.
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Who Are We Without Our Stories? Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons

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The first twenty pages has the feel of a cable TV pilot, not the opening chapter of a literary novel. I even cast it in my mind, and became half-convinced that if I could just get Alison Janney to commit to play Helen, I could have it on HBO in time for the fall season.
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‘God, Let Me Be Loved’: The Tragedy of Truman Capote

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If Capote the writer has been eclipsed in the public mind by Capote the Hollywood movie character, no one is more to blame than Capote himself. Capote, in his way, was a reality TV star before there was reality TV, always on stage, gossiping and backstabbing, forever plotting to push other people off the island.
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Peeling Back the Oprah Seal: Ayana Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie

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It is high time defenders of American literary fiction cut Oprah Winfrey a break.
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My New Year’s Resolution: Read Fewer Books

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I’m a genius, I’ve been quietly telling myself for the past 13 years, and nobody even knows it.
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A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

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Flynn is especially good at creating damaged, dangerous women whose deeply imagined inner lives break your heart even as the characters create havoc in the lives of the people around them.
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The Art of Being The Boss: On Peter Ames Carlin’s Bruce

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While Bruce is too often a workmanlike affair, one comes away from this new Springsteen biography happy that its author had the good sense to get out of the way and just let Bruce be Bruce.
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