“Maybe this is a writer thing, having pages and pages of stuff written that has not yet cohered into a completed arc, which, when you finish it, would be a laurel on which you could rest.” A writer considers Chekhov’s dictum.
The gun goes off in the end
Tenure Track
"One hears, in the news, that one new fad after another is sweeping the academy. World literature, digital humanities, book history, cognitive science. Perhaps everyone will just watch TV (there are twenty-seven panels on The Wire, and at least a paper, I recall, on Rizzoli and Isles, a TNT show)...The elephant in the room, or the one that has left the room a while ago (but whose stinking presence everyone still inhales deeply or holds their nose after), is Theory." N + 1 reviews MLA 2013.
Formative Influence
For every download of “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor,” Philip Roth’s eulogy to his high school teacher, the folks at Audible will donate a dollar to the Newark Public Library. Learn more in The Paris Review Daily’s new interview with Roth.
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So Shiny
Our good friends at The Morning News just rolled out a spiffy new look this morning! It's in support of their "news for nerds" mission, which we also wholeheartedly support. Congrats, guys. Might we suggest you celebrate by reading its co-founder (and Year in Reading alum) Rosecrans Baldwin's very funny diary from a few years back?
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First Steps
Can a book prepare you for motherhood? A reader asks this question in the Match Book column in the Times.
Old-Fashioned
“And now, as an adult, I love nothing more than curling up with a good book, closing my eyes, breathing in through my nostrils, keeping my eyes closed and not reading yet continuing to draw in oxygen for hours, and, thanks to my fetishized olfactory associations for printed and bound matter, becoming sexually aroused.” On the scent that no e-reader can ever replace.