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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Michelle Dean

New

New York

Purpose

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

" Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity. "

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

" 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

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

" People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet. "

" There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing. "

" There are many things to like about 'Mr. Robot,' the most ephemeral and yet memorable of them being the opening credits. "

" 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. "

" Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of 'Embedded': go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening. "

Michelle Dean

Out

Happening

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

" I like debate and argument, so I'm usually all right with disagreement, and I'm even all right if the critic doesn't come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it. "

" Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke. "

" 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. "

" I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct. "

Michelle Dean

Art

People

" 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. "

" The podcast revolution has taught us that women's voices aren't just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential. "

Michelle Dean

Listen

Women

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task. "

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

Michelle Dean

Primal

Desire