Dreaming of J.M. Synge

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The Synge I’d come to know needed to have an adventure to open himself up to his life, to experience risk and fear and sickness and find out that he was stronger than he thought he was. I realized that the version of Synge I’d come to know and love was actually me.
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Inscrutable India: Jaipur Literature Festival’s Baffling Bazaar of Culture and Commotion

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To voice their disapproval of the circumstances of Salman Rushdie’s absence, four writers read from The Satanic Verses — a book that has been banned in India. They were advised to leave. What kind of real intellectual discussion could go on in a setting that had proved itself so hospitable to self-censorship?
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A Rare Book Collector’s Guide to the College Library Book Sale

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Not that I was necessarily looking for an overlooked first edition, but I will declare up front that I did find one such diamond in the rough.
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A Wanderer in Poem Forest

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My grandfather died two weeks ago, in his bed, by the sea in Maine. Two days earlier, perhaps with a little help from his morphine, he looked out his bay window and said: 'I am going to run across that water.'
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The Eclectic Reading List at Occupy Wall Street

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Everyone knows that you are what you read. So to learn more about the protesters who have been occupying Wall Street for the past three weeks, it makes sense to find out what they're reading.
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Is My Book Jewish? An Afternoon with Anna Solomon

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“In my early years as a writer,” she says, “I felt like I had to write. But some part of me wanted to stop. There was a real appeal for me to do something where the answers were provided … just to have a job or be in a community where it was clear what I was supposed to do. That would’ve been easier. At its base, there’s this relationship to writing itself. Writing is so scary and unknown. When writing fiction, no one tells you what to do. There’s terror in having freedom.”
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Lost in Andalusia: A Moving Encounter with the Keepers of the Flannery O’Connor Legacy

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From the podium, Flannery O'Connor's ninety-two-year old cousin was easy to spot. She was—it became immediately clear—glaring at me.
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The German Solution: Saving Books by Keeping Them Expensive

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There seemed to be no end to the variety of bookshops in Cologne. But they all had one thing in common: they were thriving.
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A Visit to Gettysburg

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The Gettysburg gaze is a particular brand of narration that pervades the town, describing every skirmish as good vs. good. Good wins.
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My Bread Loaf

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When the rumor came back to the kitchen that a writer had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, we felt badly, but, hey, writing isn’t an easy field to break into. At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, even the kitchen crew knew that.
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A Critic’s Notebook: On Meeting Ayn Rand’s Editor at Antioch College

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This is America, he said. There aren’t many ideas. Ayn Rand had a few simple ones which she believed in fiercely and promoted relentlessly.
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Working on John Banville: My Awkward Relationship with My Subject

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I had also convinced myself that it amused me to be utterly unknown to Banville, and yet to be spending my working days doing nothing but thinking about his novels. But I’m not sure it really did amuse me. I think it felt a little indecorous; even, perhaps, a little shameful. I sometimes joked about feeling a bit like a stalker, but I wasn’t always entirely sure that I was joking.
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He Was Water: Kenyon Grads Remember David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech

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Did Wallace's speech resonate on the hot Ohio morning when he delivered it to the assembled student, or did it get lost amid the hurrah of a graduation weekend?
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Watching Cuba Watching

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I am in Havana, sitting next to Pepé on the seawall of the Malecón. The news tells me that Cuba is changing, but the sun still looks like a tangerine soaked in blood. We watch it sinking fast into the ocean.
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In the Company of Amy Clampitt

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Two years ago I spent some time in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a house once owned by the poet Amy Clampitt. I slept in her bed, rifled through her books, gazed out the kitchen window at the tree by which her ashes are buried.
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In the Room: Against a Cultural Boycott of the Galle Literary Festival

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The hollow curve of nothingness inside me sharpened to a point: I missed home with something bordering on pain or hunger. Home was a place where people would have talked about this openly.
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Saving Salinger

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“The Last and Best of the Peter Pans” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” have never been published in the nearly sixty years since Salinger wrote them.  Princeton’s Firestone Library now protects the only known copies.
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