Why Is This Story Being Told?
It isn’t realism or factuality that pulls us beneath the fictional surface, but a kind of mysterious weight, the gravity of a story that needs to be told.
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The Millions Top 10
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Bleak Humor Guides a Dizzying NYC Drug Haze in ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’
The reader’s own GABA receptors and endorphins are cross-firing along with the pill-popping narrator’s.
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Sex, Lies, and Strawberries: On Hanan al-Shaykh’s ‘The Occasional Virgin’
The notion that a woman’s virtue derives from virginity enjoys a good deal less currency than it once did. How to deal with those for whom it retains value?
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Bina Shah and Joseph Olshan: An Author/Editor Pair on Inspiration, Switching Genre, and the Edit Process
How I shape my story, mold it, form it and direct it is my craft, but it's already there on some plane that I'm accessing as I write.
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The Mirror of Erised: On Death, Harry Potter, and Retreating to Childhood Reads
For a long time, we saw reflections like Ron’s—milestones we wanted but hadn’t reached. But when Marie died, what Monica desired most was what she’d lost.
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On Nature Writing in a Filthy World
Purdy’s broader point is key: Whatever this genre, “nature writing” has made a comeback, just as more complicated works of un-nature sit beside them.
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The Rhythm Becomes a Thing of the Spirit: On ‘Religion Around Billie Holiday’ by Tracy Fessenden
“Catholicism puts them both into a larger musical conversation than the relay between rural South and urban North, between spirituals and swing.”
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SPONSORS
Top 10 Books About Online: An Excerpt from ‘Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction’
Scholars concluded that this mysterious slab was an index of the Sumerian canon. Literature began with the list: Online just made the links palpable.
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