Tag
Fiction
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Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions: Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann
“I come to the understanding I know nothing, and then I completely throw myself into the research.”
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Realism with Benefits: Of Zombies and Commuters
What’s ordinary these days in fiction (at least Anglo-American fiction) is the lives and loves of two or three school chums, what happens to them as they wander out into the post-school world, what secrets emerge and how their relationships get rearranged. You’ve seen this pattern recently (think The Sense of an Ending), maybe more…
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A Conversation with Ellis Avery
Set in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude is inspired by the Russo-Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young woman who modeled for her most famous painting, Beautiful Rafaela. De Lempicka met Rafaela on a walk in the Bois de Boulogne and drove her back to the studio: the two women became lovers,…
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The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest. Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The…
