Just another writer
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2025 Tournament of Books: Orbital vs. The History of Sound
Before it won the Booker, I was largely unaware of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital but I picked it up not too long after it won curious to see what this book was that the Booker judges felt was better than James. I had kind of expected the title to refer to freeways as I’ve generally heard the word…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Great Expectations vs Beautyland
Today’s matchup includes a pair of very disparate books. Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign worker turned New Yorker staff writer, wrote a novel that’s about his time on the Obama campaign without ever explicitly naming Obama or any of the other major figures in the campaign. Giving it the title Great Expectations certainly did nothing to…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Martyr! vs. Rejection
Today’s matchup is a pair of debuts. Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet making his debut as a novelist while Tony Tulathimutte whose story, “The feminist,” brought him some notoriety makes his book-length debut with a collection of linked stories. Both books caught my attention before this year’s Tournament of Books (I’m apparently becoming increasingly…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Headshot vs. The Book of Love
Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s. Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books.…
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2025 Tournament of Books: James vs. The Book Censor’s Library
The first “regular” match of the tournament also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Play-In Round
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at…
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Writerly resolutions: February status
So February started strong, which was nice but life can be a real jerk and between a bit of a slowdown mid-month combined with a minor disaster, I kind of stalled out. Minor disaster you say? These used to match: Why yes, I tripped and fell, landing hard on my hands, and, as it turned…
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Typography Tuesday: different kinds of dashes
The following is adapted from a reply I posted on the Writing Stack Exchange and since it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about, I figured this was a good opportunity to begin my typography Tuesday series. There are, in fact, four different dash-like characters in typographic usage: The hyphen (-) is used to join…
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Crazy bishops
My son is learning French, and being also chess-obsessed, wanted to learn the French words for various chess terms which he asked ChatGPT to provide. I don’t trust ChatGPT or any other generative AI to provide accurate answers. After all, it has provided such “delightful” knowledge as: so I made a point of looking over…