Archive for December, 2009

The art of the ditch

James Salter, who reviews a new book on Sullenberger and US Airways flight 1549, once crash-landed a plane, himself. (Via.)

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On J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime

“‘In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality.’” Jonathan Dee contemplates Coetzee’s latest experiment in memoir, and the “‘feeling of a writer deforming his medium.’”

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And the Rand played on: A view from I-95 South

Ayn Rand’s selfishness-meets-the-free-market doctrines may be odious, but she must be taken seriously, argues Scott McLemee, if only for her influence. [T]he Rand market has never been anything but robust in the years since her death in 1982. Every year, her melodramatic novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1958) have sold at least 100,000 copies each. Rand’s other fiction . . .

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