The Lowest Form of Humor: How the National Lampoon Shaped the Way We Laugh Now

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The funny guys and girls who are confident (it was dawning on me, there at that orientation) are the ones who hold court at parties. The funny guys who are diffident become comedy writers. Or, as I once read in an interview with an Onion writer speaking about the makeup of its staff—the closest thing we have to the National Lampoon in its heyday—they’re the guys who are outside the party, making fun of the guy inside telling jokes.
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Life and Counterlife: Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont

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One thing that makes Roth Unbound interesting is that Pierpont was able to interview Roth in the first years of his retirement. You can feel Roth’s reflective, relaxed state of mind as he looks back on his career, cataloging his regrets and triumphs.
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The Uses of Disenchantment: A New Generation of Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

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Living in New York turns out to be a process of earning nostalgia -- hoarding enough memories to give you the kind of claim on a place that makes it possible to leave it. When you reach your limit and set out elsewhere, memories are your consolation prize.
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The Curious Paradox of John Updike

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Updike was subject to charges of favoring style over substance from the moment he was considered a major writer, but it’s the late-Boomer and early Gen-Xer audience that Updike really annoys.
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The Smile in the Bone: Lore Segal’s Half The Kingdom

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Anyone who has ever passed time in a hospital will find something recognizable and true in Lore Segal’s new novel, Half The Kingdom.
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A Prism of Hidden Meanings: On László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below 

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Moving beyond localized meaning, the stories challenge us to examine the psychology of our moment, a time in which our inability to understand the sacred paralyzes us in its presence.
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Portrait of a Runner: On Mark Slouka’s Brewster

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It gives me great pleasure to picture the Apostle of Democracy doing quarter-mile repeats on the lawn of Monticello, perhaps in preparation for a match race with his Federalist challenger John Adams at the Founding Fathers Relays. But I digress.
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When the Stars Align: On Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries

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Under the sign of Libra, the reading public will be gifted that rarest literary treasure, a book of such dazzling breadth and scope that it defies any label short of masterpiece.
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A Little Bit Beta: On Dave Eggers’s The Circle

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The Circle occupies an awkward place of satire and self-importance.
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A Poet Goes Commercial: Nicholson Baker’s Traveling Sprinkler

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Working poet Paul Chowder from The Anthologist returns in Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, which isn’t so much a sequel as a remake. It is a novel-rhyme; the two comprise a couplet.
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The Danger in Cohesion: Tom Perrotta’s Nine Inches

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Taken as a collection, Nine Inches reveals a fatal flaw that undermines the skilled artistry: Perrotta’s heavy hand.
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The Life that Develops In-Between: On Elizabeth Graver’s The End of the Point

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Unless you’re kicking it with the Compsons or Buendias, say, it usually takes a little bit of readerly patience to get through a multigenerational family story. One has to be on one’s game, in terms of care and attention. Nobody wants to spend several hundred pages with a bunch of allegorical figures sitting around the dinner table and passing each other the salt.
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A Slingshot Full of Stories: Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath

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In David and Goliath, Gladwell appears to have started with an answer and then gone looking for people to prove him right.
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Screwing Up and Falling in Love: Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and Fangirl

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Both books are about how falling in love for the first time, particularly if you’ve never seen a love story you can relate to, can be as terrifying and confusing as it is joyful.
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You Must Read Kevin Barry

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Kevin Barry's new collection of stories, Dark Lies the Island, shares the virtues that made his debut novel, City of Bohane, such an astonishment. There is rich music, high humor and deep blackness on every page.
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Childish Things: Aimee Bender’s The Color Master

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These stories are quirky, creepy, even awkward and gimmicky in parts, the way a fairytale can be when one puts away childish things. Bender’s great gift to us all is her fierce unwillingness to give up her childishness.
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Queens As a Metaphor for the World: On Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens

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Using the New York City borough of Queens as a linchpin, Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel questions the American twentieth century’s “great comedy: that Communism had never existed, not once. So what was there to oppose?”
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The Heart of My Life, the Life of My Heart

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Not all books can make us cry and those that do are often so shamefully sentimental that we can’t easily admit to reading them, let alone crying with them. This, however, is not the case with Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, a novella-length text in three chapters, which produces in its reader tears of the most literary kind.
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