Sam Anderson’s brilliant Year in Marginalia inspires MobyLives to announce the “Melville House Marginalia Contest.”
More Marginalia
The Apples Are a Gift
“This poem fosters reading again and again, because interpretation is always reaching its limits: eventually, one runs up against a secret gesture to which the only response is either to acknowledge that there is some other conscious being that could make or decipher it, or to fantasize the being that could.” A long, worthwhile review of R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems from 3:AM Magazine.
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Personal Space
Sometimes, in a narrative, it’s necessary to focus on one scene, in one place, for as long as one possibly can. In his new graphic novel, Here, Richard McGuire takes this to an extreme, setting the entirety of the story in one corner of a character’s living room. In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews the new book.
Kiley Reid on the Babysitter’s Dilemma
In Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid used her own experience as a babysitter to explore the transactional relationship that exists when caring for someone's child.
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Epic Fail
When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
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A Less Dangerous Game
“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided later, lying in his bed, after they had played several rounds of various games, and didn’t hunt one another at all.” You probably encountered Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game at some point during your educational career — you definitely never came across this “comforting and anodyne” version, though.
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