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Western Reading; Should I Write a Memoir?
Dear Mr. Stein, This summer my husband and I will be taking a train from Portland, Oregon, to Whitefish, Montana. Can you recommend any novels set in that region? I’ve read Jim Harrison, Michael...
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Tailor-Made
Richard Anderson. “Wanted,” the advertisement read, “sixteen- or seventeen-year-old apprentice cutter for Savile Row firm. Energetic … Intelligent … Smart appearance …” I was skeptical (what the hell...
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Family Matters: Alison Bechdel on ‘Are You My Mother?’
Alison Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home , told the story of her small-town Pennsylvania childhood, which was dominated by her often tyrannical father. An obsessive home restorer and closeted...
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My Mother’s Love
Shortly after fleeing to London from Nazi-occupied France, novelist Albert Cohen learned of his mother's death in Marseille. His grief took the form of a series of personal essays for La France libre,...
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Phillip’s Dry Cleaners
In New York, I did not want to go online and search for a gifted dry cleaner, and so I took the recommendation of a friend. The shop was in Nolita, and the cleaner was skeptical. The stain was...
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Document: Tim O’Brien’s Archive
The Professional, edited by Tim O'Brien, October 11, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Tim O'Brien, courtesy the Harry Ransom Center. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam on...
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New York, Not Too Long Ago
I hadn’t seen Jake since years ago, when we had met at the Guggenheim before going away to college. I remember only one scene from the encounter: spinning around the museum’s spiraling staircase with...
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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Orwell at the BBC, and Other News
It was all the rage! On the eighteenth-century literary vogue for suicides. “It’s pretty much all hopeless,” and other advice on writing a memoir. (Personally, I would say: throw in a few recipes.)...
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Filling the Silence: An Interview with Marie Chaix
To call Marie Chaix’s work autobiographical would be incomplete, though most of her books tell and retell the stories of her life. Her writing is porous and breathes memory, attesting to memory’s...
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Completely Without Dignity: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard
Of the two people who have written books called My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard is the less notorious. In Scandinavia, where the tradition of memoiristic writing is less prevalent and self-exposing...
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A Downward Glissando
Photo: Cory Doctorow, via Flickr Fat little dog trotting contentedly along the sidewalk, right at his master’s side, with a plastic steak in his mouth. Neil Young sounds like a lonely alley cat, I...
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Joyce Recommends the Red, and Other News
“There is jollity.” (Jollity not pictured.) Social media has warped the way we think of “sharing our stories,” but the status update hasn’t obviated the need for memoir. “I worry that we’re confusing...
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A Library Without Books, and Other News
Florida Polytechnic University's new library is bookless. Photo: Rocket Science Photography / Florida Polytechnic University, via the Los Angeles Times “We’d all like to believe in untranslatable...
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John Bayley on British Wit
John Bayley with Iris Murdoch, 1980. The New York Times has reported that John Bayley died last week at eighty-nine. A literary critic and Oxford don, Bayley was best known for his vivid, searching...
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The Truth Keeps You Young
Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club turns twenty.Mary Karr. Photo © Deborah FeingoldThe first time I met Mary Karr I was, quite frankly, stunned. She was not what I had expected, not that I knew what to...
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Slayer Is Sad, and Other News
From Slayer’s Reign in Blood, 1986.Norman Rush on “the savage fictions” of Horacio Castellanos Moya and the archetype of the “superfluous man”: “The literary woods are of course as full of superfluous...
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No Regrets
Marietta Peabody Tree, from the cover of No Regrets. My mother has been on somewhat of a socialite kick lately. For a while, when I talked to her, she was reading No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree....
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By the Seat of Your Pants, and Other News
From an eighties ad for Hillbillies Jeans.Today in age-old arguments about the creative life: “In some annexes of the writing community it’s been playfully termed the ‘pantsing vs....
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There’s the Great Man
Befriending George Plimpton.George Plimpton in his office.George’s questions were like trampolines, a technology he admired. They bounced you higher—to the next question. This was particularly true...
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