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The Phoenix: The independent newspaper of Swarthmore College since 1881

The Scrivener

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Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

A flickering between truth and fiction

At one point in Ben Lerner’s new book, “10:04,” the narrator visits the studio space of his lover, Alena. Alena’s latest project…

October 2, 2014
Campus Journal/The Scrivener

Review: Murakami has nothing to say in latest novel

Here’s a joke: what’s the name of that one Haruki Murakami novel with the aimless, somewhat developmentally-arrested thirty-something protagonist who likes pasta…

September 4, 2014
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

Morrison lectures, reads to delighted full house

On April 7th, Toni Morrison spoke to a packed house – so packed that many faculty were stranded outside, forced to watch…

April 10, 2014
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

Pablo Villalobos’ static, indigestible new novel

Faced with the spiritually truncating demands of modernity, the twentieth-century idealist, as described by André Breton in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,”…

March 27, 2014
Students search for their datesBy Ellen Sanchez '13
Arts/Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

The ‘character and privilege of genius’ comes back to life

Despairing of the writer’s condition under the Soviet Union, Mikhail Bulgakov burned the first draft of “The Master and Margarita” in 1930.…

February 20, 2014
Arts/The Scrivener

A “Constellation of Genius” significantly underwhelming

In a very different world, today would be 5 December 92 p.s.U., or the fifth day of the twelfth month of the…

December 5, 2013
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

No common grief in “Levels of Life”

In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending.”  It was the first novel he had…

November 21, 2013
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

No Love, Deep Web: Pynchon’s Latest Novel Falls Flat

Thomas Pynchon was something of a Terrence Malick figure before Terrence Malick. Like the reclusive filmmaker, Pynchon likes to stay off the…

October 10, 2013
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

Review: “The Infatuations”

“The Infatuations” is a novel about death: literal death, literary death, the enduring power of the dead, and the inconvenience of their…

September 26, 2013
Campus Journal/Columns/The Scrivener

Baseless confidence: Tao Lin’s “Taipei”

In praise of James Joyce’s “Dubliners”, Ezra Pound wrote, “since de Maupassant we have had so many people trying to write ‘stories’…

September 12, 2013

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