Natalie Shapero
William Styron’s Paper Skin, etc.
The top five surprises from the newly released Selected Letters of William Styron (Random House, 2012): 5. A yacht party with JFK and Jackie. In a letter to his father in 1962, Styron recounts the afternoon: “We were sitting around a…
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Hiding Something
Literature is full of invented words, and we’re accustomed to these coinages making the leap into everyday usage. The words nerd and gargantuan, for example, made their first appearances in works of fiction. The same is true of lie detector. However, lie…
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This Month In Dispute
(A digest of reading-related happenings from court cases across the country, for the month of January 2013.) It was determined that a Colorado literary agency, at book fairs around the world, had misrepresented its relationship with the author of the…
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Our No Audio, Ourselves
In a short essay over at Counterpunch, David Rosen wonders if America’s time-honored tradition of “mean-spirited moral absolutism” is on its way out, at least at the national level. As part of his evidence, Rosen cites a recent Supreme Court…
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“Saints and Poets, Maybe–They Do Some”
These days, it seems like you can’t lean an imaginary ladder against an imaginary barn without hitting an article about Penelope Niven’s new biography of Thornton Wilder. It’s not hard to see why. Wilder was a commanding and erudite and…
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