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Love or Nothing
Shakespeare asks the big questions and sometimes he answers them. In Romeo and Juliet he asks about love, often.
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Forgot about Ray
Editor’s note: The following is a brief selection of a running diary of Game 2 of the Knicks-Celtics playoff series, played on April 19, 2011 at TD Banknorth Garden in Boston.
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The Library Full of Bowling Balls
The short story form is a special kind of animal. It is the form that students of fiction are made to learn first, as though crafting a finely-spun tale of less than twenty or so pages is the first step toward tackling the beast that is the novel. But this is mostly nonsense.
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The Cape
Recently I went to a reading by the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart at Labyrinth. He was reading from his new novel Super Sad True Love Story, a widely praised satirical novel about the very near future. Shteyngart is a young writer. Born in 1972, he appeared this summer in The New Yorker’s list of 20…
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L.A. Sublime
One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel _Underworld_. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round the World,” New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thompson’s home run off of Brooklyn Dodgers closer…
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The Book Has a Body
Jonathan Safran Foer has had a trajectory in the publishing world that is close to ideal. In 2002, at the age of 25, he published _Everything is Illuminated_, a novel that developed out of his senior thesis at Princeton where he was a philosophy major. The book was a major critical success at the time.…
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Sarah Palin’s Alaska
Sarah Palin is the politician Jonathan Swift would have imagined for this century if he were living in it. An attractive woman with some sort of strictly defined set of morals, she has exploded onto the scene because she is a masterful spin doctor, a skilled manipulator of her image, and someone who has found…
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The Making of Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson has always been a divisive filmmaker. There are those who revere him and those who think all his films are simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. But whatever you may think of him, it is hard to deny that he has style, and that he does what he likes. And most will agree that his…