Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps

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When I began, I was just trying to follow the Kafka dictum 'A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us.'
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The Hipsterati

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"It was my dad's 60th birthday. We went out to dinner in Brooklyn and he looked around and said, 'Who are these people?' I told him they were hipsters. He asked if that was like hippies. No, I told him, the short answer is that they're grown-up babies."
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Elegy for a Stillborn Story

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If we’re doing it right, the story will change us. It will die in our arms, and we will press our lips to it and breathe an idea back in. We will stand among hundreds of our stories gathered in piles at our feet, and we won’t know if we’re in a cemetery or a nursery.
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I Heart Chekhov; Better Than Booze or Smokes

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Praising Chekhov, I realize, is a little like rooting for the Yankees (or Duke; or Roger Federer)
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Writing Food, Writing Life

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Writing in itself is a sort of cooking, a combining of ingredients: sometimes the finished product turns all corners of our tastes, filling us with joy, other times, we’re not so lucky.
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The Scientifically Surreal, Eerily Erotic Novels of Kobo Abe

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Already, the mind reels. If Abe's body of work has room for an image like that, where exactly are its boundaries? If you're unfamiliar with the man's books, I'd forgive you for imagining the heaving epics of an undisciplined maximalist, novels where ridiculousness piles upon grotesquerie until both text and reader collapse.
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Legacy of a Photo

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What is the legacy of a famous photo from the Vietnam War, or of any of the recent wartime pictures of Afghanistan or Iraq? Do they have a strong enough impact to raise a call to action? Or has society become desensitized, avoiding that which causes moral discomfort, or, more chillingly, have we become aesthetic consumers of such imagery?
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Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?

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It’s now widely believed that Outbreak, the 1995 Dustin Hoffman Ebola thriller, was at least partially inspired by Caps For Sale.
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Chasing the Whale: Banksy, Obsession, and the Sea

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At first blush, connecting contemporary art to the heyday of seafaring might seem incongruous, but sailors were the eyes of the world for landlubbers, returning home with tales of what mystical, depraved and wondrous sites and cultures existed just beyond the horizon.
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The Baby-Sitters Club is Back, Baby!

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Given the current YA vampire and fantasy craze, I wonder if novels staked in the normal can find the ardent following they did with my generation. Will young readers with an acutely developed taste for bloody bites and wizard wands be captivated by the story of industrious teenagers facing the universal travails of growing up?
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A Different Species: A Chinese American Writer in China

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Amid the modern Chinese version of capitalism, with its frenzied self-invention and incessant deal-making, my pursuit seemed inexplicable. Some people demanded to know how much money I would earn off my book. Others wondered why anyone in America would care to read about my characters. A few concluded that I must be a spy.
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Lionel Shriver: America’s Best Writer?

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With her new novel, So Much for That, Lionel Shriver strengthens her already credible claim to the title of best living American writer. That’s okay. We were the same way with Faulkner and Poe. Nothing’s more American than not quite recognizing some of our most accomplished artists.
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The Trojan Horse Problem: Thoughts on Structure

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I think it’s fair to say that I adore a fairly wide range of styles and structural ideas, and yet one thing that I’m consistently troubled by is what I’ve come to think of as the Trojan Horse novel: the book that’s structured as a delivery system for something entirely unrelated to the plot.
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Ethical Vampires, Part II

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In order to enjoy the Twilight novels, you have to be willing to enter into an intense emotional and hormonal fundamentalism, the twin of the moral fundamentalism apparent in Meyer's refusal of nuance and ambivalence in favor of an either/or approach to good and evil.
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Ethical Vampires, Part I

The vampire of our cultural moment has become a "vegetarian" of sorts, a Whole Foods shopper--an individual who prefers humanely raised, sustainably farmed food. From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt. But maybe it's only skin deep?

Every Day I Open a Book

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Perhaps all those years of reading adventure stories had given me a vocabulary of action, a means to save my father’s life, as if I’d been preparing, through books, for those charged moments without knowing it.
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The Prescient Science Fiction of Thomas M. Disch

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Thomas M. Disch possessed a nightmarish imagination that combined J.G. Ballard’s apocalyptic despair and Philip K. Dick’s nightmares.
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The Problem with Fairy Tales

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Three contemporary retellings revisit the Snow White fairy tale. They all twist the old story, but do they subvert it?
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