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“If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.” Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art and meaning behind book jackets in her deeply personal new essay The Clothing of Books: http://bit.ly/2f0e20t. [sponsored]
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Start reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, one of the most talked-about books of the year. [sponsored]
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THE AFRICAN SVELTE
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We're very happy to share some changes we've made to Book Marks, our book reviews aggregator:

Literary Hub's Bookmarks is the definitive source for book reviews and critical conversations about contemporary writing.
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12 writers on the one book they’re giving away for the holidays, including Robin Wasserman, Sarah Hepola, Elena Passarello, and more.

If, as Joan Didion wrote, “we tell each other stories in order to live,” why do we give each other stories? Is it to share the pleasure that a particular book brought to us? Or to bring the knowled…
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Here are our 35 favorite books of the year, including Garth Greenwell, Han Kang, Annie Proulx, Leopoldine Core, and more.

Emily Temple, Associate Editor Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead): The best way I can think to describe this novel is as a work of historical absurdism. At its center i…
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"How does one navigate being a writer? I whine like a big fucking bald baby and pretend, like everyone else, that I’m not typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves in China. But of course I am."

Chelsea Hodson interviews Jarett Kobek on hating the internet, mansplaining, and many more 21st-century diseases.

I first heard about Jarett Kobek on the Internet—I saw the cover of his forthcoming novel, I Hate the Internet, and desperately wanted to read it after reading the first line of the book’s descript…
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Lori Jakiela on the time she was confused with Miss America for her book signing at Sam's Club. With special appearances from George Eliot and 300-count bags of roasted pig-ear dog treats.

Outside Sam’s Club there’s a bubble machine, like on Lawrence Welk. It’s meant to be festive because this is a grand opening, a new store on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, but customers swat the bubb…
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"White writers often begin from a place where transcendence is a given—one already has access to all, one already is permitted to inhabit all, to address all. The crisis comes when one’s access is questioned. For writers of color, transcendence can feel like a distant and elusive thing, because writers of color often begin from the place of being addressed, and accessed."

When writers go wrong in imagining the lives of others.

The following is adapted from the foreword to The Racial Imaginary, a collection of essays edited by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, available from Fence Books. Here are a few of the tropes you…
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"I hasten to add that I don’t think I’m injured by these guys at this point in my life, and I don’t feel sorry for myself. I just goggle in amazement at the batshit that comes out of them."

Rebecca Solnit on the power art has to make or break us.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen? The answer …
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"But here I am: a large black man in one of the whitest places in the state, sitting on the side of the road with binoculars pointed toward a house with the Confederate flag proudly displayed."

J. Drew Lanham on birding while black.

“Southern trees bear strange fruit,�Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” –Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allan), “Strange Fruit” It’s only 9:06 a.m. and I think I might get hanged today. * * * * T…
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When Werner Herzog isn't learning about Pokemon-Go, he's talking to Paul Holdengräber. Listen in on their conversation, featuring YouTube, Mexican literature, and his surprising North Korean fanbase.

In part one of Werner Herzog’s wide-ranging conversation with Paul Holdengraber, the two discuss the human side of massive volcanoes, making promises to North Koreans, and that thing known as…
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"Joyce Carol Oates has been a perennial contender for the Nobel; she is, at the very least, a lesser titan of American letters. Then she started tweeting."

Eric Thurm on gaffes, cats, and his obsession with JCO's Twitter feed.

For over half a century, Joyce Carol Oates has been a well-respected, startlingly prolific American writer. She has published over 40 novels and 20 short story collections, taught at Princeton for …
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"As much as we like Edward Snowden, we don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a “Snowden journal” because a large part of our point is that Tor can (and should) be used for ordinary things by ordinary people—not just intelligence whistleblowers."

An interview with the editors of The Torist, the Dark Web's first literary magazine.

Depending on who you ask, the “Dark Web”—the Internet’s mysterious undercurrent accessible only through specialized software—is either a libertarian utopia or a criminal hellscape…
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"This is why I carry so many books in my duffle: I want to feel as connected as I possibly can to the world around me."

Yahdon Israel on the irreplaceable magic of tactility.

Heading home on the train from class one night, a college friend recognized me and walked over. We did what many New Yorkers do when they see a familiar face in transit: played the situation up lik…
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"James was referring frankly to an uncomfortable truth about the literary world and about the novel as an inherited cultural artifact: that it is foundationally born out of interlocking systems of oppression, which we must work very, very hard not to reproduce."

In November of last year, Tin House published the text of a speech given by the author Claire Vaye Watkins, in which she spoke frankly of the various intersecting systems of privilege that affect t…
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"So let’s start by considering a list of masterly American women writers in a tradition in which we can now situate Lucia Berlin, in the hope that they—and she—might more often grace the book jackets and catalogue descriptions of the future."

On the literary genealogy of Lucia Berlin.

The double entendre in the title of Lucia Berlin’s new short story collection is a lot like the one in “To Serve Man,” Damon Knight’s science fiction short story made famous by an episode of The Tw…
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"There has always been this ingrained idea in people’s minds that books are there to teach you how to live, that they create ideals for you to uphold. Especially in the Soviet times, when they were actually remaking a human being, remaking a person, literature was there as a major tool of support."

A conversation between Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and John Freeman.

For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a …
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"It’s a little embarrassing to me when anarchists embrace me. Because—so long as they are my kind, pacifist—I love them, but I am a bourgeois housewife, I don’t practise anarchism."

The legendary Ursula K. Le Guin on racism, Utopian societies, and anarchy.

This interview originally appeared in Issue 14 of Structo Magazine. It’s not hard to see why Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her early novels. In the space of six years came A Wizard of Earthse…
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Sarah Schulman on the books that opened the doors to her imagination, including Audre Lorde, Jean Genet, Claudia Rankine, Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker, and more.

This year, the Feminist Press at CUNY, in partnership with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, launches the Corrective Canon, a new initiative that aims to lift up one book per year the press feels worth…
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