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" Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict. "

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" After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else. "

Michelle Dean

Living

Over

Holiday

" Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best. "

" There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction. "

" There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year. "

" Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall. "

" Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language. "

" Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers. "

" When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book. "

" I have deliberately arranged my life so that I see pictures of cute animals on the Internet every day. "

" A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate. "

Michelle Dean

Critic

Attention

" Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another. "

" A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts. "

" When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse. "

" Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative. "

" The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you'd be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself. "

" It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all. "

" Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics. "

" Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the '90s and the early '00s. It was not just old people who'd castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it. "

" Would we even recognize an Oliver Stone production if it didn't kick up the usual fuss? "

Michelle Dean

Stone

Kick

" Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life. "

" There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are. "

" Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity. "

" Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals. "

" Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself. "

" The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards. "

" Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person. "

" The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness. "

" Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness. "

" There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements. "

" Mary Roach's curiosity is notoriously infectious. "