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Of Bloggers and Book Clubs
Brilliant: book club in a box. Writers defend their favorite punctuation marks. Tao Lin is selling his stuff on Twitter. This gent has the largest collection of primary Hemingway works in existence....
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Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Modernists Go Off-Menu
The opening scenes of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times demonstrate the indignities mechanized factory production perpetrates upon the bodies of its workers. The first shot, of sheep herded into a pen,...
View ArticleCivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface
We loved Joel Lovell’s profile of George Saunders in yesterday’s Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders’s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special...
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Levity in the Trenches, and Other News
Got a man in the trenches? Show him you care—with roller skates. An early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises finds Hemingway getting all metafictional: “Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the...
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Papa the Investor
How Hemingway became a major shareholder in a venerable Italian publishing house. Ernest Hemingway, with pigeons, in Venice, Italy, 1954. Ernest Hemingway had a rough time with his Italian publisher,...
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Arthur Cravan, the Original Troll
Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet-boxer, was neither a good poet nor a good boxer, but he was a legendary provocateur. Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by...
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Staff Picks: Dorothy, Oz, and Arkansas
Anna Kavan If a “beach read” is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan’s Ice is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement the contemplative stillness of winter...
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Gertrude Stein’s Mutual Portraiture Society
Portraits of Gertrude Stein by Picabia, Picasso, and Valleton. Between 1908 and her death, in 1946, Gertrude Stein created over a hundred prose portraits, which she called “word paintings.” Most of...
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Surviving Unrequited Love with Ivan Turgenev
I found out about Ivan Turgenev’s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap for me between obsessing over Anna Karenina in my midteens and deciding that learning Russian was my...
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Pandora in Blue Jeans
Grace Metalious. Photo: Larry Smith. The photograph captioned “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is one of the most widely circulated portraits of a woman in history. Like most people, I first saw it on the back...
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