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The tavern as tabernacle

“The model I saw was that a writer was someone who sat at the table writing.” At B&N Review, I talk with writer, bartender, and NYT Mag drink columnist Rosie Schaap about her new book Drinking With Men.

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New Yorker classics

At The New Yorker’s Double Take, Alexander Chee, Laura Miller, Dwight Garner, Sloane Crosley, and I choose some of our favorite longreads from the magazine’s archives.

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Things I’m Doing

I’ve updated events page to include upcoming appearances at the Pratt Writers’ Forum, Jerusalem International Book Fair, and 2013 AWP Conference, and a reading from the anthology What My Mother Gave Me, at Greenlight Books. Later updated to say: I just saw Kirkus’ nice bit of praise for my essay, “Mess Up Your Mind,” from the anthology (now a New . . .

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Better boundaries, with Muriel Spark

My contribution to The Awl’s Year in Advice series includes many tips from Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington, most notably how to shake off (and not to be) a pisseur de copie. A selection: His writings, she says, “writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words. … . . .

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