Essays
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EssaysWhy Fiction Matters
Escaping the Prison of Realism
Darryl Pinckney
I was surprised in Elizabeth Hardwick’s writing class at Barnard when she told us that the mystery of Jay Gatsby was that he was Jewish.
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EssaysWhy Fiction Matters
Great Fiction is a Force for Peace
Roxana Robinson
An archaeologist friend told me recently about the discovery of an oral tradition stretching back for 10,000 years. They were stories told by...
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Essays
In Praise of Edith Wharton
Roxana Robinson
A look at the classic author by Roxana Robinson.
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Essays
The Drip Drip Drip of Another Consciousness
Jane Smiley
Last night, I dreamed about my novel Ten Days In the Hills, not one of my best received, but certainly one that I enjoyed writing.
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EssaysLines of Resistance
Morning After
Roxana Robinson
In a new essay, author Roxana Robinson (Sparta, Cost) reflects on her experiences campaigning for the Democratic Party in...
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EssaysSyntax/Synapse Essays
Abounding and Superabounding
Elizabeth McKenzie
It had been a small reading, the kind one expects of course, and I knew everyone who attended, except for one man who was neither an old friend...
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Essays
In Response to Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker piece on Edith Wharton
Roxana Robinson
“Jonathan Franzen (in his essay in The New Yorker, “A Critic at Large”) addresses “the problem of sympathy” for Edith Wharton
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EssaysThe Story of the Book
What Else Would a Young Film Star Wear?
Maggie O'Farrell
In this essay, Maggie O’Farrell, author of This Must Be the Place, writes about how an unforgettable object found its way into her fiction.
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EssaysSyntax/Synapse Essays
A Fiction for the Future
Erik Hoel
At first it happened slowly, then all at once. We are now living in a world that would have been considered science fiction to any twentieth-century novelist.
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Essays
Remembering Robert Stone
Roxana Robinson
“When I first read Robert Stone’s work I was struck by the beauty of the sentences. That’s the way a writer reads, listening to cadence...