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" The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust. "

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" For a long time, it seemed as if podcasting was a male realm, but no longer. Sure, there are lots of men doing podcasts, but women are voicing a lot of the form's biggest hits. 'Serial,' the podcast that made podcasts a phenomenon, was narrated by a woman. "

Michelle Dean

Woman

Time

Women

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

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

" 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. "

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

" The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.' "

" 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

" For a long time now, movie characters have generally been articulate, even chatty. Call it the influence of Woody Allen, but we have become used to characters who are well able to explain themselves to others. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I've come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase 'female friendship,' because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships. "

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

" The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering. "

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

Michelle Dean

Stone

Kick

" 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. "

" Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book. "

" I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day. "

" Most people do not pay attention to the publisher's imprint on a given book. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story. "

" The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art. "

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

" 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. "

" The children of the 1980s were the last before a lot of things changed. We were the last generation not to have cell phones, not to have video games, not to have parents who worried if we strayed from the yard. "

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

" 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. "