Lists Notable Articles

12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use

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Writers get blank journals for the same reasons that teachers get mugs, assistants get flowers, and grandmothers get tea. If you want to give the writer in your life something he or she will truly adore, here are twelve ideas.
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Notable Articles Year in Reading

A Year in Reading 2011

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Lists Notable Articles The Future of the Book

Reasons Not to Self-Publish in 2011-2012: A List

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You see, Reader, I still don't plan on self-publishing my first novel, though I don't deny the positive aspects of that choice.
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Essays Notable Articles

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’

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The irony was clear: here I was, cheating on a novel that had once been my mistress!
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Essays Notable Articles

Bartleby’s Occupation of Wall Street

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If Occupy Wall Street has any goal, it should be to have the same effect that great literature has — to unsettle.
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Essays Notable Articles

Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?

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Is it a mass sellout, a belated and half-hearted attempt by writers to chase the market? Or are two disparate worlds finally merging?
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Essays Notable Articles

Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

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The truth is, my novel isn't selling, and it probably won't. There, I've said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?
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Essays Notable Articles

Making Room for Readers

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It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach. It’s a mistake to assume that readers are “mostly born and only a little made.” Because those discoveries in libraries and bookstores -- and, yes, on my parents’ shelves, too -- are what made me a reader, not some mysterious, bibliogenic accident of birth.
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Books as Objects Notable Articles The Future of the Book

The E-Reader of Sand: The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover

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It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it.
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In Person Notable Articles

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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Lists Notable Articles

Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2011 Book Preview

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Lists Notable Articles

Six Egyptian Writers You Don’t Know But You Should

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More writers from Egypt made the longlist for the $50,000, 2011 International Arabic Prize for Fiction (IPAF) than writers from any other country. And now it was Egypt's Arab Spring. Where was the work of these men and women, work that was a catalyst for the ongoing social transformation of the largest nation in the Middle East?
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Notable Articles Reviews

On the Desire to Be Well-Read: A Review of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

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The advice of many aesthetes turns the reader’s capacity for pleasure into just another test of his cultural status—and the effect of this kind of sly pressure is to make it more difficult to distinguish what we enjoy from what we think we ought to enjoy.
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Lists Notable Articles The Future of the Book

Kindle-Proof Your Book in Seven Easy Steps!

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For the Luddite writer who wants to put her royalties where her mouth is, I offer the choicest trade secrets...plus a Top 10 list of eBook-resistant texts.
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Essays Notable Articles

The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels

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I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through.
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From the Newsstand Notable Articles

What We Call What Women Write

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In the wake of comments Jennifer Egan made after her Pulitzer win, former Egan fans are uniting under the notion that in addition to being a meanie, Egan is setting feminists back 50 years. How could she?
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Essays Notable Articles

How Avant Is It? Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and the Novel’s Way Forward

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Huge claims have been made on behalf of the novelist Tom McCarthy. But what do they actually tell us about "the future of fiction?"
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Essays Notable Articles

The Pen, Mightier

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We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl.
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