Entries from July 2010

Jul. 29, 2010

A Writer on Monday Morning

Buzz Bissinger vents his self-doubt on Twitter.

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Jul. 26, 2010

Gorgeous Borges

From the latest round of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, a sumptuous cover for a collection of essays by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s enough to make a writer green with envy. Design by We Made This, a graphic design studio in London (with a lovely blog, too). More about the Borges cover is here. Still, my [...]

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Jul. 19, 2010

Fitzgerald on creating characters

“Start out with an individual and you find that you have created a type — start out with a type and you find that you have created nothing.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Jul. 16, 2010

Starting Over

Finishing one book, starting another.

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Jul. 13, 2010

How James Bond Got His Name

Ian Fleming explains.

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Jul. 11, 2010

Henry James, age 57

A memorable image of a weary, haunted-looking and very human Henry James.

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Jul. 9, 2010

Losing LeBron

There is not much left to say about the LeBron James debacle, but at least one good thing came out of it: this memorable front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

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Jul. 9, 2010

Flaubert on Life and Work

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” — Gustave Flaubert

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Jul. 7, 2010

Circadian Novels

Novels that take place in a single day, of which Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are the Adam and Eve, are apparently called “circadian novels.” I have never heard the term before, but I’m happy to learn it today via novelist James Hynes’s wonderful blog. Hynes links to a very smart [...]

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Jul. 6, 2010

R.I.P. Inkwell Bookstore

Another one bites the dust: the wonderful Inkwell Bookstore, an indie in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the Cape Cod town I have been visiting in summer for 35 years or so, has closed. I will miss it. If you have a favorite independent bookstore, support it!

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