Dead Not Deid · James Meek: A Great Radical Modernist

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London Review of Books | 05/14/08 10:31

The opening story in James Kelman's 1998 collection, The Good Times, is called 'Joe Laughed'. It's nine pages long and is told from the point of view of a boy who plays football on a patch of waste ground among derelict industrial buildings by the river in a large, unnamed city which British readers are bound to assume is...

  Unhoused · Terry Eagleton on anonymity

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London Review of Books | 05/14/08 10:30

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a...

  Diary · Kevin Kopelson: Confessions of a Plagiarist

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London Review of Books | 05/14/08 10:29

I quote too much. Give me a good line - what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph - even a Proustian one - and I'll shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you'd ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris -...

  Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous collection, Armageddon in Retrospect, released last month, features the classic author-drawn caricature on the cover. How can you not love famous figures who draw self-deprecating self-portraits (Vonnegut, John Lennon, Alfred Hitchcock, and errr... Schoenberg)? I...

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Blog of a Bookslut | 05/14/08 9:36

Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous collection, Armageddon in Retrospect, released last month, features the classic author-drawn caricature on the cover. How can you not love famous figures who draw self-deprecating self-portraits (Vonnegut, John Lennon, Alfred Hitchcock, and errr... Schoenberg)? I conversed via e-mail with jacket...

  My favorite footnote of all time comes from Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: During intravaginal stimulation,* perivaginal muscular contractions of about .8-second duration and about one second apart were palpated. *Finger-fucking.

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Blog of a Bookslut | 05/14/08 8:54

My favorite footnote of all time comes from Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: During intravaginal stimulation,* perivaginal muscular contractions of about .8-second duration and about one second apart were palpated. *Finger-fucking.

  Jonathan Yardley takes a second look at John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. (Thanks to Rolf for the link.) The short answer is that the good humor is still there, but the book itself now seems strained, dated and not really very funny. This is disappointing if not surprising, but it leaves unanswered...

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Blog of a Bookslut | 05/14/08 8:01

Jonathan Yardley takes a second look at John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. (Thanks to Rolf for the link.) The short answer is that the good humor is still there, but the book itself now seems strained, dated and not really very funny. This is disappointing if not surprising, but it leaves unanswered the question about Steinbeck...

  Experiments

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Conversational Reading | 05/14/08 7:56

Authors aren't the only ones who can experiment: Approximately two-thirds of trade publishing respondents said they believe experimentation is crucial to the future success of the industry, while more than 75% of educational and professional publishers believed innovation is critical to the future. Just over 81% of trade...

  This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Front by Patricia Cornwell. Win turns to Lamont as the others leave. "Don't hold out on me again," he snaps. "So you feel guilty that you inherited millions from your father, who I shot dead when he was raping you last year? There's no need to siphon...

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Blog of a Bookslut | 05/14/08 7:49

This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Front by Patricia Cornwell. Win turns to Lamont as the others leave. "Don't hold out on me again," he snaps. "So you feel guilty that you inherited millions from your father, who I shot dead when he was raping you last year? There's no need to siphon funds to Romanian orphans anonymous...