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Prose That Swings

The Typewriter for Orchestra (1950) by Leroy Anderson, performed at “Voces para la Paz,” Músicos Solidarios, Auditorio Nacional de Música de Madrid, June 12, 2011. The soloist is Alfredo Anaya. Euphony — the music good prose makes — matters. It may be the product of rhyme; of rhythm; of consonance (“The repetition of consonants or of a consonant pattern, […]

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How Not to Respond to Hatchet Jobs

As an author who’s seen the fruit of seven years’ labor reduced to a smoking hole by a drone strike in The New York Times Book Review, I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more revenge killings by aggrieved authors. Come to think of it, I can’t recall any, which, given the nursed grudges and preening […]

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Flame Wars

Technopagans! Brain-jackers! Amok robots! An African-American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg! Before Wired, before the Web, there was Flame Wars, the mind-ripping anthology of essays on digital culture that launched the discourses of Afro-Futurism, cyberfeminism, and cybersex studies.

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