Bites: Decent thoughts on today’s fiction (I know!), Bruni is replaced, Gladwell’s Mockingbird, Kubrick’s unmade work, middle-class “slave labor”

By Willa A. Cmiel Lee Seigel for the Washington Post on the End of the Episode.  It’s a greatly informed, well-put essay on changes in American fiction.  (Finally a good essay on contemporary fiction.  Seigel is critical but not raging, constructive but unassuming):  “Are you a Narrative or Episodic personality?… Or do you think that you live, like Huck Finn and every other picaresque hero, from isolated minute to isolated minute – episode to episode – and that far from adding […]

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The “Death” of Book World

I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t care about the impending death of print media. Once in awhile, out of casual guilt, I try to scan one of the multifarious articles on the subject but usually I only make it halfway through. More often than not, I just skip them altogether. And now, as the Washington Post’s printed Book World kicks it, the debate refuels: is High Culture on the demise? The screams of terror sound anew and […]

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