I Don’t Read to Like

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What do I like to read? I’ll know it when I see it. Or, better, I’ll become the person who wants to read that book when I see it.
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Refusing to Look Away: On Leila Guerriero and Joan Didion

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We read writers like Guerriero and Didion so we don't forget that looking at people is the most uncomfortable and powerful thing a writer can do.
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When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

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One of the pleasures of Walls’s 'Thoreau' is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist.
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Revising the History of the Art Show Urinal

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It wasn’t even the piece that was groundbreaking—it was the narrative pushed to popularize it. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was the truer Dadaist, but Duchamp the better marketer.
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I Don’t Love You, Toronto: On Books and Cities

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When anyone asked me why I was in Toronto, I’d say, “Love,” and then muse over the love I didn’t feel for the city after all these years of living here.
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Writing My Way Home

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What Kansas City lacks in ocean views and crumbling old-world charm, it might make up for with a wide-open emptiness that practically begs to be filled. It’s all potential here.
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You’re a Writer Now

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I was starting to lose hope. I was drinking too much wine as a way to temper the barrage of rejections cluttering my inbox, and as a result, I’d wake every morning at two or three or four and lie there, hungover and heart pounding, despairing that no one would ever love what I’d made.
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Life, Literature, and Litigation

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The email came almost immediately and it was spikey with threats. She recognized herself, and so had a friend of hers. And she said she could prove it. She had, she said, already spoken to a lawyer, and she was going to sue for defamation and invasion of privacy.
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The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

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To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemporary literature’s most sophisticated exponents of the sacred.
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The Soft Colonization of Small Territories

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There is something calming about crafting a sense of comfort in a place outside of my control.
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In Search of Lost Words: Novels on Dementia

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Grief is not something to be avoided.
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Sexy Backs and Headless Women: A Book Cover Manifesto

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The messaging is clear. These covers are code for “women’s fiction”—i.e. breezy, easy, accessible. For many women authors who don’t happen to write breezy fiction, we feel caught in a double bind, with a cover that demeans the book in the eyes of the literary establishment while also promising readers a kind of book we didn’t necessarily write.
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Why We Read and Why We Write

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What we gain by reading is what we often strive for in life when we’re actually thinking about what we want.
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Nicknames I Have Known (Or: An Elegy for the Mooch)

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There was Joe Bugs, an exterminator and small-town mayor, whose one daughter married my uncle. There was Ernie the Attorney, who grew up with Pop and became the family lawyer. There was Satellite Bob, who installed and fixed his televisions for decades. There was Video Bob, too (before my time), and there was Ralphie Boy (a hefty man, so large and so old, it’s nearly impossible to imagine him as a child).
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Chronicling Life’s White Machine

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It is not hard to mentally recast writers as social media types: Knausgaard, the maximalist oversharer; Lerner, the pomo ironic; Cusk, the reticent philosopher; Heti, the more traditional diarist.
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Requiem for a Reader

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My first memory of my father as a reader was him telling me to hurry up; it was almost time to silflay.
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When Capitalism and Christianity Collide in Fiction

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According to a recent study, 38 percent of Christians say “capitalism is at odds with Christian values.” Those findings echo a stubborn tension between Christianity and capitalism in American life, an uneasiness that shows up repeatedly in American fiction.
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Brevity Is the Soul of It: In Praise of Short Books

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Short books are not narratives, but devices: instead of the telescope of a long novel or history tome, they are a pair of sunglasses, allowing you to see the world, briefly and temporarily, in a different shade.
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