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" I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review. "

Michelle Dean

Writing

Book

Care

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" The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age. "

" 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

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" The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal. "

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" Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs. "

" I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it. "

" When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said. "

" Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life. "

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

" We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media. "

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

" Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading have been closely associated. "

" 'Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The plot of 'Stranger Things' is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it. "

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

" While 'Twilight''s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella's mooning over her vampire lover. "

" The alienated man lashing out at society is a trope that popular culture loves to explore. "

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

" 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. "

" Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara. "

" Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage. "

" Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless. "

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

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

" Push the envelope too far as a female artist, and you may only earn an ocean of ink expressing concern for your delicate constitution, amounting to a caution against playing on traditionally male wavelengths. "

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