Top Ten Reasons Real Books
Are Better Than e-Books
The top ten reasons that e-books just can’t replace real books.
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Tags: Top Ten Reasons to Love Snail Mail
The ten periodicals that make mail delivery a joy.
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The Courtyards of Rebirth:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part II
It is appropriate to tiptoe into the courtyards of suffering and rebirth and listen, watch, and learn.
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What Ghosts Teach:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part I
Book available on Amazon.com.
What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life? You might tell me to Google Washington Irving or the Brothers Grimm and see what lessons they intended, but I am dead serious when I ask this question.
I ask it because in the early part of the [...]
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On Fantasy Fiction;
Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight
I’m tired of seeing fantasy ghettoized. Genre was made to be transcended, and Jeffrey Overstreet’s The Auralia Thread seems to be doing just that.
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Keep up the Conversation:
A Reflection on David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was one of the few creative nonfiction writers who really captured the whole postmodern messiness of today. I haven’t read anyone else who can accomplish the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-belly feat of creating work that is both hip and packed with moral insight. I am afraid that the new space he created will be like a room after a party, deserted and echoey, now that Wallace is gone.
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One of Authenticity’s Last Great Sanctuaries?
Photo: Sean Talbot
It didn’t surprise me when Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement and host of the Uptown Poetry slam, told me that ministers sometimes “lurk in the shadows” of the Green Mill Lounge, a prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, during the Sunday night poetry slam. When I first moved to Chicago, I, too, lurked [...]
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She Spoke to Silence
Vassar Miller’s body was out of order, but her soul held rhyme and reason.
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Shutting Up Our Inner Censors
Whereas before, the impulse to express myself was instant and important, I lost not just the urge but the ability to communicate.
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