On the Nightstand: On Deciding What to Read Next

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Of the mess of books that has been unsystematically scattered throughout my home, and my life, which ones will make it to the nightstand? In what order will they be stacked? Perhaps most importantly: how will I decide?
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The Longest Silence: On Writing and Fishing

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Fishing, like writing, is a stab at permanence in a world of waiting.
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Because I, Too, Am Hungry: On Food and Reading

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Tell me reading about those farmers, very early in the morning, devouring those biscuits, those eggs, that ham, that coffee, doesn’t do something for you, doesn’t make you feel as if you could hoe a field, doesn’t make you want to go out and get that shit fucking done.
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Practical Art: On Teaching the Business of Creative Writing

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This is the inside joke of creative writing programs in America. We know creative writing doesn’t make money, and yet we continue to graduate talented writers with no business acumen. At best, it is misguided. At worst, it is fraudulent.
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Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Eco-terrorists So Different, So Appealing?

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Are these activists terrorists, as the government would have us believe, or are they avenging angels performing a vital service, as they themselves believe?
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Hemingway for Hotels: The Ritz-Carlton’s Flash Fiction Ads

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In Culture Trust 2.0, we’re all Don Draper, and we’re all susceptible to his slick salesmanship.
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Beckett’s Bilingual Oeuvre: Style, Sin, and the Psychology of Literary Influence

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If Beckett’s reworking of English contrives to escape Joyce, it is an escape that simultaneously mimics him, for Joyce had already endeavored a great escape of sorts.
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A New Lease on Apathy: On Samuel Beckett’s Echo’s Bones

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No one is tougher on a Beckett character than Beckett, and perhaps no character receives as much abuse as the first major one, Belacqua Shuah.
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Nothing Is at Stake: On Shakespeare, Lana Del Rey, and the Relatable

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Maybe Shakespeare sucks because -- and to the extent that -- life sucks.
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Everyone Is Looking: On American Expat Literature

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It’s impossible, of course, to sum up the vast breadth of expat literature, but we can still make out, in these stories, how we and a great deal of Europe have interpreted our character as a nation.
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The Art of Close Writing

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Close writing really is an amazing thing. Consider that this essay right now has been narrated in the third person, and yet there is no question as to what Clark's opinions are.
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Extinction Stories: The Ecological True-Crime Genre

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We are living in the midst of the worst die-off since the dinosaurs fell victim to an asteroid 65 million years ago. Whatever the proximal causes, human beings are the asteroids this time.
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The Academy of Rambling-On: On Bohumil Hrabal’s Fiction

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Read the stories. Read the novels. Just read Hrabal.
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Italo Calvino’s Science Fiction Masterpiece

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Cosmicomics is that rarity among progressive texts: its premises are absurd and almost incoherent, yet the plot lines are filled with romance, drama, and conflicts that draw the readers deeper and deeper into the text.
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New Edition, Old Problems: On Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

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My first response to the new edition was to wonder whether it was an attempt to steer readers away from the unsavory aspects of the novel, a trigger warning-age sanding down of edges.
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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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A Degree in Books

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This is what college should be like — all shade, dusty books, and lofty conversation.
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Edan Lepucki and Bill Morris on the Road to Publication

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Four titles, four agents, at least a dozen drafts, and more rejections than I care to count...
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