Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
~ Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”
Authors have always faced a tough path: chronic rejection, no job security, low pay (if you’re lucky). But there’s a new threat to add to that list of old perils: the online revenge review. Everybody’s a critic, even the tailor
My father’s father was a carpenter. I never met my grandfather, but I know from photographs and stories that in addition to farming, keeping dairy cows, and working on a cannery line, he earned money by carpentry. I also know from the sawhorses that my father inherited from his father The Last Bookstore
New biographies shed light on the cohort of Germans of Jewish descent who historians have portrayed as having served the Nazis. Before Schindler’s List, an L.A. studio boss saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust. Why was he alone
"I always tell my students that if the reader knows something about your psychology that you do not admit, you're in trouble. The reader will notice that you're an asshole because instead of going to your mother's deathbed you're out buying really nice designer boots. If you don't acknowledge the assholery of that choice, then there's a rift, a disjunction between narrator and reader. And in autobiography, that intimacy is part of what readers want. They have to trust your judgment."
Mary Karr, interview, The Paris Review (Winter 2009)