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Read It Again
As my grandson sits beside me, I feel the echo of my son or daughter when we’d read together, and the even more distant echo of my father, who taught me, with a single book, the power of a human voice channeling the delights of a story.
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Stuck Inside of Stockholm with the Nobel Blues Again
Dylan always developed his lyrics and music to reflect his shifting identity as a human. One might say the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature could be considered a group award for every Bob Dylan there has ever been.
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Something You Can Use: The Writer’s Self-Healing Wound
A psychic wound can be its own healing agent, may itself contain a gift, and may offer a form of unexpected inspiration. Yet how to embrace this elusive not-damage within the wound?
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Trouble Using Light: The Complications of Art in the Fiction of Christine Sneed
Sneed offers, with quiet confidence, her characters’ increasing complexities. People, like the best art, deserve more than one interpretation. There is little black and white contrast in Sneed’s work, and she lingers in every gradation of shade in between, as if gray were a full palette of color.
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Silently, Side by Side: Reading with My Son
Maybe those days of curling up in bed with a story were long gone, but what if we read the same book together silently in the living room? If I bought two copies of a novel, we could take on chapter-length chunks each evening and then discuss what we’d just read. Perhaps in this way I could gently lead my son to an appreciation of the deeper internal landscapes that literature offers.
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Shepherding Sadness: The Fiction of Mia Couto
Why all this recent success for a writer that you’ve probably never heard of? Couto is a master at inverting reality, reversing the order of the world with a swift aphoristic grace that leaves us puzzling over our normal assumptions.
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Every Day I Open a Book
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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