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Welty fans converge

Natchez will host a Eudora Welty centennial celebration. A local documentary about the author premieres at the event.

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The other side of the window: Novelist Jonathan Baumbach on independent publishing

Jonathan Baumbach may be best known among hipsters as the dad who has a cameo in The Squid and the Whale, but more fundamentally he’s the experimental writer who co-founded the venerable Fiction Collective in the ’70s when his third novel, Reruns, was not picked up by the commercial publishers who put out his first two. After Fiction Collective published . . .

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James Baldwin improvises like a writer, at You Tube

Several months ago the L.A. Times’ Carolyn Kellogg pointed out how amazing it is that long-dead authors can “continue to exist, in shadowy form, on You Tube.” Today I uncovered several videos of the great James Baldwin. The one above is my favorite. It makes me wish he could have lived to see Obama inaugurated.* * But I reckon he’d . . .

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