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Nonrequired Conversations

My essay “Conversations You Have at Twenty” was apparently shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009. (Thanks for telling me, Alexi.)

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Satan for kids, or Get thee behind me, Pikachu!

This children’s book on ritual abuse — a product, no doubt, of the ’80s Satanism scare — is the kind of thing my mom would have sold at her ¨ber-fundamentalist bookstore alongside the Jack Chick tracts and Dungeons and Dragons exposés, so for me it inspires a dull sort of dread rather than surprise or amusement. (Via.) Even I was . . .

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A Ballardian childhood

J.G. Ballard raised his children alone after his wife’s death. The Guardian publishes his daughter’s eulogy.

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My favorite books, and other highlights, of 2009

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how steeped my childhood was in Bible stories, that R. Crumb’s graphic rendition of Genesis infiltrated my thoughts the way that it did, but I was. Because his book was the one that affected me the most this year, it’s my pick for Salon. What I say there is partly a retread . . .

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