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Black Beard

Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: The Good Soldier

March 23, 2010

I was recently accepted to a PhD program I applied to at the end of last year, and as part of my acceptance, I’ve been awarded a teaching fellowship. At first I will be given only freshman composition courses, but as I gain more experience I will have the opportunity in subsequent years to oversee [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Raymond Carver

March 9, 2010

I just finished Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk, which I’ve mentioned briefly before, but which I would like to write about again, in a way, because of many topics covered in the book to which I responded.  For example, Pamuk writes in several places about returning later in life to books he read in his [...]

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Black Beard Finds His Socrates

February 27, 2010

I met up with my friend McKenzie Davis, a fellow writer, recently at KGB Bar in New York.  McKenzie is a voracious discusser of all things—most ridiculously, when we both lived in Boston, we once spent the better part of a half-hour hashing out the fundamental qualities that must be in place for food to [...]

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Black Beard on Writer’s Block

February 23, 2010

Perhaps you noticed last week that I posted only one column in this space, rather than my usual two.  This was because I was struck with a bout of writer’s block when I woke up Thursday, which put a stop to everything.  Yes, I was frustrated, but at the same time I am entirely fascinated [...]

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Black Beard Abuses His Forum by Complaining About the Subway

February 17, 2010

Yes, I admit that what follows is nothing more than a public venting of my frustration with the New York City subway system and has no bearing or connection to art or literature.  That being said, I’ll justify writing this post by claiming that my grievance with the MTA is due to the adverse effect [...]

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Black Beard Explains How to Write Realistic Fiction and That’s All

February 12, 2010

So far, I’ve been able to avoid spending an entire post ruminating on the process of writing fiction.  It’s true, I suppose, that in a way everything I’ve discussed is somehow related to my views on the creative process, but I have not, until today, explicitly stated how I think one should go about writing [...]

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Black Beard Explains the Meaning of Greatness as it Pertains to William Faulkner

February 9, 2010

William Faulkner is the greatest American writer of the 20th Century.  On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to be the kind of profound statement one could build an entire column around, and yet after finishing The Collected Stories of William Faulkner last week, I was so moved by the thorough mastery and brilliance [...]

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Black Beard Uses Orhan Pamuk as an Excuse to Talk About Himself

February 6, 2010

This week I began reading Other Colors, the collection of essays, speeches, and other non-fiction writing by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.  It’s a fine book, not really exceptional but enjoyable enough that I continued reading past the first page. However, the good-but-not-great quality of Pamuk’s writing in this instance drew my [...]

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E-Readers are the Future of Book Publishing But Will Never Replace Actual Books for Black Beard

February 2, 2010

As long as books continue to be released in their current form, I will never buy an iPad, Kindle, or Sony Reader. I readily acknowledge that digital copies are superior to paperbacks when it comes to storage, transportation, and research (searchable online copies of Ulysses alone have saved me hours of time spent looking up [...]

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Black Beard Offers Praise and Criticism for the Dead

January 29, 2010

J.D. Salinger died on Wednesday, and so did Howard Zinn.  Their deaths are interestingly coincidental in that both writers share the commonality of having their careers defined by a single book—The Catcher in the Rye and A People’s History of the United States respectively—and also in the opposite ways each author handled the success of [...]

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