Orwell and the Tea Party

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George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much. After all, he considered himself “a sort of pamphleteer” rather than a genuine novelist. Yet sixty years later, Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.
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Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons

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And, as evidenced in The New York Times and elsewhere, the punctuation push has indeed gone upward. In comments, threads, emails, blogs, newspapers, and magazines, compelling colons abound.
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20 More Under 40

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With apologies for obviousness, we hereby present our own informal, unscientific, alternate-universe "20 Under 40" list.
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A Speculative 20 Under 40, from 40 Years Ago

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If you look back 40 years to the year 1970, there were many more established, award-winning authors under the age of 40.
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It’s Not You, It’s Me: Breaking Up With Books

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Recently it struck me that the list of books I’ve started and not finished has grown quite formidable. I ask myself what this “means,” if it reflects some kind of moral devolution.
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Haruki Murakami and the Art of the Day

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What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed.
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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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All Great Works of Literature Either Dissolve a Genre or Invent One: A Reading List

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A contemplation of Dyer, Markson, and Coetzee, three books that embody my aesthetic really, really well, plus many additional titles to explore.
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Confined By Pages: The Joy of Unread Books

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I often find that the book I have read is somehow not as exciting as the book I had imagined reading.
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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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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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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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Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward

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J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I had begun to measure mine with status updates.
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Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

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One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.
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In Our Parents’ Bookshelves

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Even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life
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