February 2012
209 posts
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I don’t think it is that chameleon-like. What I’m saying is I’ve written the...
– Kazuo Ishiguro, The Paris Review
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January 2012
131 posts
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The proverb says mystery does not occupy space. All right, fine; but it crosses...
– César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind
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One day left to sign up for World Book Night... →
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Nicholson Baker's Act of Desperation
From The Paris Review:
“My twenties weren’t terribly productive. I wasted a lot of time. I had a mental deadline that I would finish a book by the time I turned thirty. I blew the deadline. I had a job doing technical writing, which was really consuming me. I wasn’t sleeping. So my wife and I figured out that we could live for six months, mostly with the money she had saved up. I quit the...
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There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
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If there's an essential essay collection, it's... →
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16 years, 9 short stories
“After you settle in as a university professor, things really start to take off. Over the next five years, you write and publish four more stories (at roughly once/year, that’s twice as fast as you published the previous five). You win an NEA Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency, two MacDowell residencies, and one of those four stories (which is actually nonfiction) is published in Best...
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30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs →
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To me, art itself is a religion.
– Jonathan Franzen
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Franzen on ebooks and the future of reading
“The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?
“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring.
“Someone worked really hard to make the...
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Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
– Geoff Dyer
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You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom...
– Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
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camouflage, n.: There are still times at work when I feel I am playing dress-up,...
– David Levithan/@loversdiction