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A Pile Up
Back from an unannounced (and unforeseen) hiatus in blogging, I have so many ideas accumulated that I don’t know which to focus on. So here are brief mentions of various articles that have piled up over the last few weeks, all of which deal with artists who have worked within the “pile up” as Annie Dillard understood it—i.e., the place....
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Speak, Memory
It seems appropriate to describe my relationship with the work of John Updike—poet laureate of the upper-middle class American bedroom—as a love affair: much more than a one-night stand, but much less than a committed, trusting marriage. His passing in January at the age of....
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The Fat Girl...and Her Father
It has been ten years since Andre Dubus, the acclaimed short story writer and essayist, died of a heart attack at age 62. That realization hit me earlier this spring. It was maybe a month after my second child was born, and I was still in the thick of hot, headachy nights listening to all-night....
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Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?
J.D. Salinger is not the kind of writer who gets a lot of scholarly attention. I can think of maybe five books that can be called“Salinger criticism,” and most of them were published in the 1960s. Salinger is not a writer for critics, he’s a writer for....
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Famous Writer
I was walking down a concourse in the Philly airport when I looked up to see the Famous Writer staring down at me. Actually at first glance I was sure I was looking at the British actor, Bill Nighy. But it was not. It was him, a well-known literary writer who....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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