Tag: fiction
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Four Thousand Weeks in the Midnight Library
Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library asks: What if you could explore every what-if of your life, specifically those that turned into regrets? How many of your other lives would actually turn out better than your real one? It’s an intriguing philosophical question that quickly turns personal for the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed, who comes…
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Learning fictions
I’ve been on a fiction reading tear recently. In the last fortnight I’ve finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig—all with a mix of print and audiobook. I just started The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller on…
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Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters
A friend of mine recently moved to northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He said he’d been looking online for information about the region when he stumbled upon mention of an obscure book that was supposed to really capture the area well. It was the short story collection Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters by…
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A skeptic’s ‘Glance at the Public Libraries’ of 1928, from H.L. Mencken’s ‘American Mercury’
Watch out, world: we’ve got ourselves a 90-year-old hot take! In the June 1928 issue of The American Mercury, a periodical edited by the famous journalist H.L. Mencken, there’s an article by Fletcher Pratt called “A Glance At The Public Libraries”. I stumbled upon the issue while processing material at the Frances Willard House Museum.…
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The Church of NaNoWriMo
My name is Chad Comello and I am a failed novelist. I’m in the midst of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which issues a lofty goal for aspiring literary types: write 50,000 words in the span of 30 days, no matter what. Budding scribes of every stripe participate in this movement throughout the month of November,…
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An Exchange of Words with Alena Graedon
Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange, was kind enough to chat about the process of bringing her first novel to life and where she finds solitude in a noisy world. (This interview appears in the second issue of the Simba Life Quarterly.) Comello: First off, how has the response been to the book? Any surprising reactions…
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The Word Exchange
Warning: Here be minor spoilers. I collect cool words. It started with Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: words like calumny, bugbear, abstemious, and postprandial popped out as I read that great history of Prohibition a few years ago, and I wanted to remember them, so I wrote them down. I’ve done that…
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A Novel Ninevember
Fiction usually isn’t my thing, but I want to get better at it. So I’m reading nine novels in November’s thirty days and writing about them here. I’ll update this post as I go along. Some spoilers, natch. Update: Just made it through the ninth book, with only hours to spare. I’m very glad to have deepened…
# books, Ender’s Game, Fahrenheit 451, fiction, Fortunately the Milk, Gilead, Jerry Spinelli, Lois Lowry, Marilynne Robinson, Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Paul Coelho, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Ray Bradbury, reading, review, Stargirl, Stephen Chbosky, The Alchemist, The Giver, The Ocean at the End of the Lane