Did Vladimir Nabokov Write the Great Refugee Novel?

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During the first hundred pages, you might even assume that this is a comic novel. But as the tragedy of Pnin’s life unfolds, in flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader is shocked into a deeper awareness of the reality of the refugee’s life in exile.
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Travesty and American Usage

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The Unethical Appeal is a permanent part of Internet culture — its founding rhetoric, perhaps. It’s a cheat code, nonbiodegradable trash. A rhetoric is a kind of technology, and we would just as soon vanquish the Unethical Appeal as we would bring back factory jobs, or speak to one another on the phone. Its pervasive role in the election — and the elevation of those for whom the Unethical Appeal is their sole expertise — is what’s truly unprecedented; I imagine it also accounts for the distinct feeling that we’re living in a revenge porn of a country.
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Escaping the Waste Land: On Flannery O’Connor and T.S. Eliot

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Eliot delivers the ruins. O’Connor preserves them, navigates them, and then, inspired by Catholicism, discovers in them an original form of grace.
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John Morris and His Astonishing Century

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My inventory led to an unassailable conclusion: not all that much has changed in my lifetime, really, and certainly not in the fundamental ways my grandfather’s day-to-day life changed.
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My Body Is Mine

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When I started to dance again I insisted silently to myself it was just about the money, but the moment I stepped back in the club, the moment I slithered into my favorite piece of sheer pink lingerie, brushed black mascara onto my eyelashes, and slipped into my eight-inch platform shoes, I felt relieved. I felt home. I was addicted.
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The Man Behind the Masks: On Nabokov’s Forewords

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After all the humorous huffing and puffing, all the tricks and traps and underhand maneuvers on the author’s part, the forewords exist, after all, to locate the English-language versions of Nabokov’s books within the context of a person in exile.
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Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana

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In Havana, the spirit of Hemingway endures, much like the architecture of the city itself, a fading reminder of what was and what might have been.
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American Contrasts: Poe and Emerson

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The Transcendentalists wrote to bring light and hope to the world; Poe showed that light makes shadows.
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Abortion and Fiction

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God may have His opinions, but in literature -- as in life -- human judgment and stigma seem to prevail.
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Comfort Food: The Importance of Reading Aloud as Adults

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Reading a story aloud is a way to take care of someone, a kind of caretaking that isn’t overbearing or smothering, and doesn’t feel like babysitting.
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Another Shade of Darkness: The Life and Work of Beryl Bainbridge

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Bainbridge had no airs about her; she enjoyed nothing more than having a drink or three at her local pub with a friend, or bumming smokes from a young interviewer while explaining how she was trying to quit by puffing on her foul cabbage-leaf cigarettes. For her, being a writer was simply about the end product, not the person behind it.
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Writing Against Yourself: On Leonard Michaels’s Nachman Stories

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Regardless of how we evaluate a book’s success, it is gratifying and noteworthy to see a artist pushing against his or her own inclinations and instincts.
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When the Private Sector Funds the Arts

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What we have here, when for-profit private interests take over, is not an artist residency, but a propaganda content factory. The content must "be approved by a Mall of America Marketing representative" to not be "contradictory to the Mall of America’s desired presentation of the Mall."
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Two Schools of Climate Fiction

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All over the world, mean temperatures rose till the polar ice caps melted and the glaciers turned into torrential rivers and the contours of the continents were altered. At around 350 degrees Fahrenheit, the equator had become a veritable oven.
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There Are More Important Things Than Happiness: On Reading Eimear McBride

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Which of these two scenarios -- despair so great it drives one to suicide, or happy forgetting -- is preferable in a novel of our times?
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Stuck Inside of Stockholm with the Nobel Blues Again

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Dylan always developed his lyrics and music to reflect his shifting identity as a human. One might say the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature could be considered a group award for every Bob Dylan there has ever been.
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Forty for 40: A Literary Reader for Lent

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The Lenten narrative is marked by violence, suffering, anticipation, and finally, joy. Back by popular demand, here is a literary reader for Lent: 40 stories, poems, essays, and books for the 40 days of this season.
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How P.D. James and Detective Fiction Healed My Broken Heart

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If ever there was a lesson for the recently bereaved, I felt that was it: You can feel everything, but life must move forward. You are needed.
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