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Packer novel incoming

ZZ Packer says she’s finishing her novel about the Buffalo Soldiers. See her next Thursday at the Katrina Benefit/New Stories from the South party.

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Even more literary quips, observations, & instructions

In remembrance of an afternoon spent in the NYPL archives, reading Herman Melville’s letters to the Hawthornes, with Ms. Carrie Frye last week, I’ll start with a quote from Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” published August 24, 1850: “But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot . . .

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