What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer's work, but a literary biographer's central concern isn't a writer's work; it's the writer's life. And, though the gods of capitalism may grumble at my saying this, an artist's work and life are radically separate things. The art comes alive only when it meets another mind, like desert seeds that wait patiently until a freak rainfall wakes them, flowering, from sleep. A life, however, is made of baser stuff, such as breakdowns in grocery-store checkouts, simmering humiliations too banal to record, deeply questionable habits of hygiene. Any smart reader understands that no biography could possibly reveal its subject's true life, which is to say the humming, prismatic, spiky interior one that gives rise to the writer's works. We readers are only voyeurs, at a remove from a unique imagination, trying to peep in. The best that literary biographies can do is build a good simulacrum: a scrupulously explicated version of events that happened, a valiant attempt at a filled-in outline.
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Denne historien er fra January - February 2023-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Boat Fish Don't Count
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The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism
A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari
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Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve
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You Think You're So Heterodox
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A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
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IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.
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He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.