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Recent Posts
- “Show me yourself.”
- “When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir – here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop.”
- “In 1848 William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked on a five-thousand-mile journey of mutual self-emancipation across the world.”
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Monthly Archives: June 2014
“What is the difference between a self and a soul?”
Why read poetry? If you read novels because you like to find out what happens, and if you read non-fiction because you like to learn something, why read poetry? I read it because I like to think about questions that no … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged best poetry, elegant questions, Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, unsolvable problems
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“Montaigne proved himself a literary revolutionary from the start, writing like no one else. . .”
I’ve always been interested in how writers choose to structure their stories. I was particularly curious about the narrative architecture of this book because it’s a biography about someone who is famous for the revolutionary way he constructed his autobiography. … Continue reading
Posted in non-fiction
Tagged Best biography, explore ideas, How to live, Montaigne, narrative structure, Sarah Bakewll
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“There was a sunlit absence.”
This is the first line of my current-favorite poem by the Irish poet who was said to be “permanently homesick.” I wonder if somehow he enjoyed being homesick. (Absence isn’t dark, it’s “sunlit” and the title of the poem is “Sunlight.”) It describes his … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged favorite poem, homesick, Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems 1966-1987, sunlight
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