Ayelet Waldman talks Hobgoblin and More

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"[T]he characters and story are very very far from my life. I think [Red Hook Road] the best thing I've ever written, which, when you think about it, is pretty telling. Perhaps we should all be grateful that I'm now writing a TV pilot about magicians and con men who spy for the British in World War II."
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On Bad Blurbs and the Heavy Lightness of Yates’s The Easter Parade

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The blurby back-cover declarations struck me as so off-pitch, that they in fact helped me to clarify for myself just what I think The Easter Parade is, and isn’t.
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Friday Night Lights, The Final Season: Join the Team

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What has surprised – and in a way instructed – me most is how effectively FNL employs what is essentially formulaic drama; that is, how aware we are of being immersed in a constructed moral universe, and yet how little the drama’s predictability compromises either one’s engagement or the show’s objective artfulness and excellence.
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Staff Pick: The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac 1900 to 1950

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Phelps and Deane were interested in the individualized, romantic convergence of reader and writer; in the deeply-felt notion that literature matters in life, that indeed it is life.
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The Great Divide: Writing Across Gender

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Do we ever really “forget” the author? Does she ever truly recede when we are reading gender-crossing works? Do we necessarily want her to?
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The Long and the Short of It: Linked Story Collections Bridging the Divide

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To me, the short story is this miraculously compressed form, elegant and complex, small in shape but large and deep in meaning; it has the capacity for perfection in a way that the novel does not. Many writers work their way “up” to writing a novel; perhaps my artistic trajectory will be to work my way “down” to writing gorgeous, perfect short stories. Who knows? I look forward to finding out.
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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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Sorkin’s Rapid-Fire May Have Jumped the Gun: Thoughts on ‘The Social Network’

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How can we have perspective on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26 year-old founder, or the cultural power of Facebook, when the phenomena – both man and network – are clearly still evolving, in both our realities and our collective minds?
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Fall Book Picks (Part 2): Shop Class As Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

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“By the mere fact that they [mechanics] stand ready to fix things,” Crawford writes, “as a class they are an affront to the throwaway society. Just as important, the kind of thinking they do, if they are good, offers a counterweight to the culture of narcissism.”
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Fall Book Picks (Part 1): Life Work by Donald Hall

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“Once, in a headlong sentence I clearly intended to say ‘life,’” Hall writes of a therapy session during dark years of marital meltdown and alcoholism, “but by mistake…said ‘work’ instead.” This recollection illuminates the theme of Hall’s beautifully crafted meditation cum memoir.
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The Great Gatsby Revisited

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What struck me most is how The Great Gatsby as a “literary treasure,” as something we refer to as a classic, is so much less than what the novel actually is – which is something both gorgeously and impeccably wrought.
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Literary Endings: Pretty Bows, Blunt Axes, and Modular Furniture

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It's tempting to imagine a linear spectrum of ending “types,” with tied-up-in-a-bow on one end, chopped-off-with-a-blunt-ax on the other. But really, there are so many different kinds of literary endings. What constitutes “satisfying” for different readers?
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