Consciousness on the Page: A Primer on the Novels of Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker understands how often people think about sex, but he also understands that, often times, they just think about shoelaces — and he understands those thoughts of sex and shoelaces aren’t as far apart, in form or in content, as they might at first seem.
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Aleksandar Hemon’s Jumbo Lexicon

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Hemon evidently loves the dictionary, but does not use it as a means to demonstrate his intellectual superiority. He delights instead in sharing with us what he’s just discovered.
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“Who Will There Be to Talk To?”

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My dad is not a writer, though his camp letters to me many years ago betrayed an ability to fashion the written word in a surprisingly vigorous manner, particularly when stacked up against the troubled verb conjugations of his spoken words. “What do you mean, Dad, a manuscript?” I asked.
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Snake Meat and Reefer: Horacio Castellanos Moya

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You can’t get a word in edgewise so you just sip your beer or your wine and wonder if it’s the cocaine talking or something they got from their psychiatrist. But you are enjoying yourself, because however one-sided it is, they’re supplying everything a good conversation needs – sex, secrets, politics, and death, and because they’re funny, really funny, even as they’re being morbid or petty or paranoid.
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Strange Flowers and Gubbinals: On Teaching and Pain

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What teacher has not felt this pain—the pain of the audible yawn from the kid in the back row just as you launch into the lesson you worked on for an hour and a half—or worse, the lesson you spent only ten minutes preparing and are now feeling vulnerable about?
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Salinger in Vienna

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Part of the sadness here comes, of course, from a young woman being robbed, senselessly and viciously, of her life. But it is sad, too, in the way it deprived a young man, a man who hadn’t even known her that well, the luxury of remembering her without bitterness, of being able to ask lightheartedly: “I wonder what So-and-So is up to?”
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Sunday Mornings

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Since my kids won't be old enough to read this for a few more years, by which time they'll probably hate me for other reasons, I'll say this out loud: I sometimes fantasize about a life without them.
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The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B.R. Myers

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And so he whirled mirthlessly on, flourishing the word "prose" like a magic wand, working pale variations on his "Reader's Manifesto." In your face, Jonathan Franzen!
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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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Warning! Teenagers Inside: The Appeal of the Young Protagonist

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Teenagers have a real drive to be independent, to discover and define (or defy) their identities. And yet, they're also powerless. They have their parents' will to contend with, and their friends' complicated codes of behavior. They have the secret shames of the body. They long for the purity and ease of childhood even as they fling themselves into adulthood. In short, they make for compelling characters.
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The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter

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Sad but true, the rejection letter, like so many things in book publishing, is a shadow of what it used to be.
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The Perils and Pleasures of ‘Idle’ Parenting

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I give my Idler book a big hug for bucking our stateside Be Perfect Do Everything Under the Sun child-rearing culture. Tom Hodgkinson's answer to almost all of our must-do's and have's -- from Tae Kwon Do classes to extravagant vacations -- is a firm but friendly "Don't do it!" Just stay on the couch to ponder life.
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Shaving Cream and Heart Attacks and Learning When To Fear

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These are the things my son James has been afraid of in the 16-months that he's been alive: The grinding blender, the roaring vacuum, disembodied voices on the speaker phone, the time I pantomimed a broken leg, being put to bed alone in his crib.
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Burned

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Michael Westen and I had work we liked, and we don’t have it anymore. We’re burned, and we’re spending a whole lot of time trying to get back into the game.
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The Sixth Memo of Italo Calvino

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On the eve of his departure for the United States and with five memos written, Calvino died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the book, the sixth memo is written in the faded letters like an invitation to finish the list for him, as if it could (and should) be almost anything.
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James Ross and The Agony of the One-Hit Wonder

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James Ross published just one novel in his lifetime.  This is a rare thing because of a paradox that lies at the heart of novel writing: it demands such sustained focus, such persistence, so much raw pig-headed stubbornness that anyone who does it once almost invariably does it again.
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‘You Like Sandra Cisneros, Don’t You?’ On Reading Outside Your Culture

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“Just wait and see,” she said, as we ate samosas outside of my dorm. “Right now, you’re an English major set on law school. A few months from now, you won’t be. You’ll get caught up in this writing thing.”
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Our Meals, Ourselves: A Short History of Food Writing

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“Tell me what you eat,” wrote Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “and I will tell you what you are.”
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