david

Some quick exercises to counter these tendencies:

1. Pay close attention to when your pattern-sensing radar goes off and you start congratulating yourself for seeing something you've seen before. Why? This is often a signal that you might be overgeneralizing.


2. Write down where you've worked and for how long, compare those contexts, and ask yourself,

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Into this fog slipped Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare . The novel, Butler’s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It’s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly... See more

In the spring, before I began teaching and lost the capacity to read anything more robust than a play (no offense to plays), I read Isabel Waidner’s second novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility , whose eponymous protagonist has just won a prestigious literary prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. And yet the trophy itself eludes him: neon... See more