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Reality Hunger: A Crash Course via the Epigraphs

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has three epigraphs: "Art is theft" (Picasso), "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one" (Walter Benjamin), and "When we are not sure, we are...

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Where Do Books Come From?

My new book, How Literature Saved My Life, was published by Knopf a little more than a month ago, and as I've been traveling around the country talking about it, a lot of people have asked me how the...

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Fifty-Two-Card Pickup

In my previous blog post, "Where Do Books Come From?", I talked in a general way about how I moved from my first novel, Heroes, to my second novel, Dead Languages, and in today's post, I'm going to...

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“Fuck the Game If It Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’”– Public Enemy

Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity was my first work of nonfiction — the first work in which I forged a form that felt entirely "my own" and in which my voice felt unmistakably my...

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The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Bored

So I wrote some books that used sports to get at larger questions, I hope, of race, vicariousness, masculinity, and American mythology, but I was wearying of writing about sports; I was still following...

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How Literature Did, More or Less, Save My Life

Heavily under the influence of self-reflexive documentary film (esp. Ross McElwee) and anthropological autobiography (esp. Renata Adler and George W. S. Trow) and monologuists (Eric Bogosian, Spalding...

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A Very Partial Reading List

I recently heard someone say that if a writer doesn't investigate uncomfortable places within himself, why would he bother writing? All great books wind up with their authors getting their teeth bashed...

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