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	<title>Entertainment &#187; Lev Grossman &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Entertainment &#187; Lev Grossman &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com</link>
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		<title>The Life of J.G. Ballard: An Alien Among Us</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/24/the-life-of-j-g-ballard-an-alien-among-us/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/24/the-life-of-j-g-ballard-an-alien-among-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:15:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[J.G. Ballard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Shanghai]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3528556</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I’m not really a Ballardian. I&#8217;ve met Ballardians, and I know when I can&#8217;t compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: Vermilion Sands, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World. I’ve never read his really difficult, spiky stuff, like The Atrocity Exhibition. I can respect a book with a chapter entitled &#8220;Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan&#8221; without necessarily wanting to actually open it. But I&#8217;ve always felt drawn to Ballard, not just by his work but by his weird life, the story of which he told in lightly fictionalized form in Empire of the Sun, which then got turned into an excellent movie, possibly Spielberg’s best, starring a 12-year-old Christian Bale. (And there’s more of it in Ballard’s The Kindness of Women.) Now Ballard has told it again, in entirely unfictionalized form, in his last book, a slim but wonderfully luminous memoir called Miracles of Life (to be released in the United States Feb. 4). Actually it’s called Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography, which is approximately one subtitle too many for my personal taste, but it&#8217;s still a beautiful book. The best bits, not wholly surprisingly, are in the first half, and deal with Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai before and during WWII. His father ran the Chinese division of an English textile firm there, and he and his family were part of the small, louche, cocktail-swilling expatriate society, contained within the larger cocoon of the vast Chinese city. (MORE: Paint a Vulgar Picture: A Fan’s Notes on a Biography of The Smiths) (This is clearly a good if extreme way for parents to produce writers. Mervyn Peake, of Ghormengast fame, was a child in the European compound in Tientsin.) Ballard’s memories of Shanghai are vivid, seething crowd scenes of beggars and soldiers and servants and dragon-ladies and con-men. They spin by the boy Ballard as he pedals madly around the city—then all at once the action will grow still as he pauses on a<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3528556&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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			<media:title type="html">Image: J. G. Ballard</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Paint a Vulgar Picture: A Fan&#8217;s Notes on a Biography of The Smiths</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/16/paint-a-vulgar-picture-a-fans-notes-on-a-biography-of-the-smiths/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/16/paint-a-vulgar-picture-a-fans-notes-on-a-biography-of-the-smiths/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:00:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[biography]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Morrissey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Smiths]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tony Fletcher]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3528020</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Most people who know me know that I have a biography problem. (At this point even some people who don’t know me know this.) I keep one going at all times, sometimes several, like cigarettes. I’m not particular as to the subject. I’ll take a writer, if you’ve got a writer, but I’ll read biographies of rock stars, actors, chefs, soldiers, politicians. This year I read Bob Spitz’s Dearie, about Julia Child, and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, about Lyndon B. Johnson. I read Alex Kershaw’s The Liberator, about Felix Sparks, a soldier who fought at Anzio and commanded the force that was first into Dachau. I tried to read Saul Steinberg, by Deirdre Bair, who’s one of my favorite biographers, but I bounced off for some reason. Maybe because I found Steinberg a bit more unpleasant than I was hoping. The last one I read was A Light That Never Goes Out, by Tony Fletcher, which is a biography of the Smiths. Unlike those other choices, which were at least semi-arbitrary, this one is not. Because the Smiths are My Favorite Band. (MORE: Read an Excerpt from A Light That Never Goes Out) That shouldn’t surprise anybody. The Smiths are the kind of band people tend to have as their Favorite Band. But it’s a tricky thing, reading your Favorite Band’s bio, because what if it turns out that you don&#8217;t like them? Personally? I like the Rolling Stones, but I like them a little less now that I’ve read Keith Richards’ Life, which I found bumptious and self-involved. (I also read Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis&#8217;s autobiography, in which he talks about opening for the Rolling Stones. “That’s Mick’s imported antique wood flooring from the Brazilian jungle, and that’s what he dances on. If you so much as look at it, you won’t get paid.” I liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers slightly more after Scar Tissue.) Naturally as a Smiths fan I’ve read Johnny Rogan’s Morrissey &#38; Marr: The Severed Alliance, but I never thought of it as<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3528020&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/154415630-e1358275860387.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">The Smiths</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Shakespeare in Klingon: Literature in the Original and My Total Failure to Read It That Way</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/28/shakespeare-in-klingon-literature-in-the-original-and-my-total-failure-to-read-it-that-way/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/28/shakespeare-in-klingon-literature-in-the-original-and-my-total-failure-to-read-it-that-way/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:30:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3523271</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[To me, the single greatest line in any of the eleven Star Trek movies comes in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It’s when the soon-to-be-assassinated Klingon chancellor remarks over dinner: “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” The fact that it sort of makes no sense only makes it that much better. (Caveat: I haven’t seen Star Trek: Nemesis. After Star Trek: Insurrection I needed a break. A long break.) Fortunately — unless I’m gravely mistaken about a whole lot of things — I actually have read Shakespeare in the original, because I read English pretty fluently. But that’s the only language I can say that about. Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language — and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages — I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English. (MORE: Is National Novel Writing Month a Literary Threat or Menace?) I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years. In those eight years I managed to crawl through exactly one French novel, L’Étranger by Camus. (I was also shown Diva and Jules et Jim repeatedly, and sometimes they even forgot to stop the projector and we got to see the parts with partial nudity.) When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French. And for about a year I actually was at the point where I could look at a page in French and feel like I was understanding what it was saying, more or less. I read, or at least passed my eyes<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3523271&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/shakespeare.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Image: William Shakespeare</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>On the Physical Abuse of Books</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/14/on-the-physical-abuse-of-books/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/14/on-the-physical-abuse-of-books/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3522494</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When I left college I thought — based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked — that I might like to go into book publishing. After a lot of unsuccessful querying of eminent firms in that field, I obtained an internship with a non-profit publisher called The New Press, a dynamic and worthy company that was just preparing its first season of books. I’m happy to report that The New Press is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern. Though I did learn some important lessons at The New Press. For example: one day I was chatting with the woman who handled the printing and distribution side of things. She was making a technical point about bindings, which I was failing to grasp, so to illustrate what she meant she picked up a book and — with a little effort — tore it in half. I froze. I stared at her. “What?” she said. (MORE: World Book Night: Which Titles Will Be Given Away in 2013?) The “what” was, I had never seen anybody rip up a book before. I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn’t destroy books. Hitler destroyed books. The sanctity of the physical book was analogous to the sanctity of the physical body. You would no more rip up a book than you would pick up a hammer and smash somebody’s knee with it. And given a choice, you go for the knee. But my feelings about that have changed. I am now an absolute bastard to my books. This didn&#8217;t happen right away. After The New Press I went on (piling up abandoned careers with a will) to work at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, where books were treated with tender professional care. When you took a book off the shelf, you didn&#8217;t just grab it, you placed your fingers on its upper surface and<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3522494&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/books.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Image: Old Books</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Muggles Take Manhattan: J.K. Rowling Live at Lincoln Center</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/17/the-muggles-take-manhattan-j-k-rowling-live-at-lincoln-center/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/17/the-muggles-take-manhattan-j-k-rowling-live-at-lincoln-center/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:46:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Potter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[J.K. Rowling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lincoln Center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Casual Vacancy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3519352</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The 'Casual Vacancy' author sat down with Ann Patchett to discuss novel structure, '50 Shades of Grey' and when she still visits Hogwarts<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3519352&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/118445930.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - Part 2 - World Film Premiere</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Chinese Novelist Mo Yan Receives Nobel Prize. But Is He Politically Correct?</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/11/chinese-novelist-mo-yan-receives-nobel-prize-but-is-he-politically-correct/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/11/chinese-novelist-mo-yan-receives-nobel-prize-but-is-he-politically-correct/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Faulkner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Frankfurt Book Fair]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mo Yan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nobel prize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Red Sorghum Family]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3518615</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s traditional for English betting houses like Ladbrokes and Oddschecker to offer odds on the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s also traditional for those odds to be completely unrelated to the actual outcome. You don’t meet a lot of people whose ship came in with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio in 2008. This year the Swedish Academy broke with that tradition by awarding the prize to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who was considered by the betting houses and everyone else to be a frontrunner, behind only the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and the Hungarian Péter Nádas. Mo is prolific and popular, arguably China’s most prominent contemporary novelist. His work has been filmed—the movie Red Sorghum was based on one of his novels—and even sells a few copies in America. And we&#8217;re notorious for our xenophobic reading habits. (MORE: Lunch with China&#8217;s Mo Yan) Yes, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Mo&#8217;s reaction: “he said he was overjoyed and scared.” The Nobel citation praised Mo as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million. If anything Mo is almost too well known. He&#8217;s the second Chinese author to win the prize for literature, after Gao Xingjian in 2000, but he’s the first who retained his Chinese citizenship—Gao was born in China but went into exile the 1980s, and had taken French citizenship by the time he won. Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, was (and is) in prison. The Chinese response to Mo&#8217;s selection appears to be a mixture of huge national pride with a certain strain of bitterness among writers and critics who don&#8217;t consider Mo radical enough in his opposition to the Chinese state. “Mo Yan” is in fact a pen name—in Chinese it means “don’t speak.&#8221; The irony, for a novelist, is intentional: Mo chose his pseudonym, he has said, to remind himself to moderate his natural outspokenness. Mo was born Guan Moye in Shandong province in 1955.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3518615&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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			<media:title type="html">Mo Yan</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>J.K. Rowling&#8217;s The Casual Vacancy: We&#8217;ve Read It, Here&#8217;s What We Think</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/27/j-k-rowlings-the-casual-vacancy-weve-read-it-heres-what-we-thought/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/27/j-k-rowlings-the-casual-vacancy-weve-read-it-heres-what-we-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Sep 2012 05:01:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Booker Prize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Potter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[J.K. Rowling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roald Dahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[T.S. Eliot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Casual Vacancy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3516158</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rowling's first literary novel for adults is a surprising triumph<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3516158&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/27/j-k-rowlings-the-casual-vacancy-weve-read-it-heres-what-we-thought/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/casual-vacancy.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Casual-Vacancy</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>I Hate This Book So Much: A Meditation</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/25/i-hate-this-book-so-much-a-meditation/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/25/i-hate-this-book-so-much-a-meditation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anna Karenina]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[In Dubious Battle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kafka]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3507915</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In some books, the sentences are dead tennis balls, no air in them, no fuzz on them, coming at me across the net with no spin at all<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3507915&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/2100_ent_books_0724.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Hating book</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Hating Ms. Maisy: The Joy, Sorrow and Neurotic Rage of Reading to Your Children</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/18/hating-ms-maisy-the-joy-sorrow-and-neurotic-rage-of-reading-to-your-children/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/18/hating-ms-maisy-the-joy-sorrow-and-neurotic-rage-of-reading-to-your-children/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:43:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[childrens books]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3507140</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For the past eight years, off and on, I’ve been reading picture books aloud to my children. You read a book out loud every night for two years, and you wind up spending a lot of time thinking about it.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3507140&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/untitled-11.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Children&#039;s Books Collage</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>I Admit It: I Don’t Really Like Christopher Nolan’s Movies All That Much</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/18/i-admit-it-i/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/18/i-admit-it-i/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:59:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Movies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Batman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christopher Nolan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Point Counterpoint]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the dark knight rises]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3506619</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[At least one person dares to argue against the 'Dark Knight' helmer's directorial supremacy<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3506619&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Movies</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/movies/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/145700770.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
		<media:thumbnail url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/145700770.jpg?w=240" />
		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/145700770.jpg?w=240" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Director Christopher Nolan</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>What Ever Happened to Hysterical Realism?</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/11/what-ever-happened-to-hysterical-realism/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/11/what-ever-happened-to-hysterical-realism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Foster Wallace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hysterical realism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3506133</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I’m currently reading Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace. I could blog about it now, but it’s not out till September, so that would just be annoying. (It may already be annoying, in which case: sorry.) It’s a “balanced” portrait, by which I mean that along with all the stuff about Wallace&#8217;s brilliance there are also some unflattering surprises. For example: I didn’t realize Wallace was struggling with so much anger. A moment from the biography, circa 1990, which was a time of great personal and creative frustration for Wallace: Big Craig [the model for Gately in Infinite Jest] happened to watch a car cut off Wallace one day when the latter was driving near Foster Street. In fury Wallace rammed his car into the other person’s. “He got out of the car, scratching his head,” Big Craig remembers. “Oh gee, what happened?” Myself, I never met Wallace—I never even had a car accident with him—but I did speak to him on the phone once. This was in 1999, when Brief Interviews with Hideous Men came out, and I interviewed him for Time Out New York. We talked for maybe an hour; he had a soft, humorous, very appealing way of speaking that was hyper-articulate without beating you over the head with it. I’m sure the piece ran—I can picture it on the back page—but I can’t find any trace of it online, so it&#8217;s possible that I hallucinated the whole episode. What I remember most about the interview was how self-conscious the sound of my spring-loaded late-&#8217;90s keyboard made him as I took notes, and also how badly I wanted to be Wallace’s best friend by the end of it. I think he had that effect on a lot of people. (MORE: Lev Grossman&#8217;s Book-Buffer for June and July) Reading Max’s book also caused me to re-encounter James Wood’s famous review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in The New Republic in 2000, which Max quotes. It&#8217;s the one where Wood coined<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3506133&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/600_ent_wallacebio_0710.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
		<media:thumbnail url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/600_ent_wallacebio_0710.jpg?w=240" />
		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/600_ent_wallacebio_0710.jpg?w=240" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">D.T. Max&#039;s David Foster Wallace bio</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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	</item>
		<item>
		<title>My Book-Buffer for June and July</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/03/my-book-buffer-for-june-and-july/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/03/my-book-buffer-for-june-and-july/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:40:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ben Macintyre]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Broken Harbor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dave Eggers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Boynes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Literature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Frayn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mission to Paris]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[novels]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richard Lloyd-Parry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Summer Reading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[True Crime]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3505401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Seven book reviews — done speed-dating style<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3505401&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/bookmaship_0702.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Bookmaship_0702</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
		</media:content>
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		<item>
		<title>Adventures of a Rare (and Not Very Rare) Book Collector</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/27/adventures-of-a-rare-and-not-very-rare-book-collector/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/27/adventures-of-a-rare-and-not-very-rare-book-collector/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2012 14:00:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[A Handful of Dust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Animal Farm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fifth Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mrs. Dalloway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Now We Are Six]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oratione]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rare books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reviewing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Golden Bough]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Magician's Nephew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Sun Also Rises]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Virginia Woolf]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3504322</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A tour through the highlights of my collection—which almost has value<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3504322&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0126.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
		<media:thumbnail url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0126.jpg?w=240" />
		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0126.jpg?w=240" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Cicero</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/77c4d80ad85632f86f82b5709527fe7c?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/the-sun-also-rises.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">The Sun Also Rises</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/animal-farm.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Animal Farm</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0126.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Cicero</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0129.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">DSC_0129</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/a-handful-of-dust.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">A Handful of Dust</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/the-magicians-nephew.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">The Magician&#039;s Nephew</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/fifth-business.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Fifth Business</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/reviewing.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Reviewing</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/now-we-are-six.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Now We Are Six</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dsc_0079.jpg?w=360" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">DSC_0079</media:title>
		</media:content>
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		<item>
		<title>The Department of Justice vs. the Publishers: Nobody Wins</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/20/the-department-of-justice-vs-the-publishers-nobody-wins/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/20/the-department-of-justice-vs-the-publishers-nobody-wins/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:45:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amazon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Department of Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[e-book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kindle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[publishers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3503659</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[(Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) This week I&#8217;m posting from the road, &#8220;the road&#8221; meaning San Francisco, where I&#8217;m touring to promote the release of my most recent novel in paperback. One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country. (In the first quarter of 2012, revenues from e-books surpassed those from hardcovers for the first time in history. I&#8217;m glad Maurice Sendak didn&#8217;t live to see this.) Which makes it all the more incredible that publishers are willing to ship the aging bones of an actual flesh-and-blood author around the country. I guess personal presence — actually being there — is still worth something. It&#8217;s certainly worth something to me! Being a writer can be isolating. It&#8217;s good to be among readers and booksellers. Being a writer is about them, not you (and by you I mean me). If you spend too much time in your little writing hobbit-hole, you can lose sight of that. I had a few different plans for this week&#8217;s column, but they were all derailed when I read this piece by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker about the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Apple and five major publishing houses, and got a bit upset. (READ: War and Peace E-Book Readers Find a Surprise in Their Nooks) I&#8217;m totally unqualified to talk about the legal merits of the lawsuit. I know as little about the law as it is possible to know and not actually be in prison. I&#8217;m only slightly more qualified to talk about the business aspects of the matter. I do know enough to know that the lawsuit is insanely complicated. Auletta explains it better than I ever could, but very sketchily, the suit turns on publishers&#8217; efforts, successful so far, to find an e-book retailing partner, specifically Apple, that would allow<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3503659&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Books</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://entertainment.time.com/category/books/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/98161729.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
		<media:thumbnail url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/98161729.jpg?w=240" />
		<media:content url="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/98161729.jpg?w=240" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Scales of Justice</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Lord of the Ringworld: In Praise of Larry Niven</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/13/lord-of-the-ringworld-in-praise-of-larry-niven/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/13/lord-of-the-ringworld-in-praise-of-larry-niven/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:25:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Larry Niven]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ringworld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Science Fiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://entertainment.time.com/?p=3502881</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[(Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) You know how it is with your literary heroes — you never want to stop crapping on about how great they are. (&#8220;Crapping on&#8221; is one of my wife&#8217;s expressions. She&#8217;s Australian, and at this point I no longer know which idioms are American or Australian anymore. So in case that one needs explanation, it basically means &#8220;refusing to shut up.&#8221;) And I can crap on with the best/worst of them about Joyce and Woolf and Kafka and whoever else, but there&#8217;s already been plenty of crapping on about them. You know who I don&#8217;t hear enough about? Larry Niven. I think it&#8217;s fair to say that Niven is the quintessential &#8220;hard&#8221; SF writer. He was born in 1938 and fits into that generation in between Golden Agers like Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein and the cyber-info-punks like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Hard SF — as I choose to define it, irresponsibly, with no reference to or knowledge of how other people define it — is SF that takes its science and engineering seriously. There&#8217;s a school of science fiction where the writer decides where they want the story to go and then makes up a world or a technology or a branch of physics that will get it there. This is not that. Hard SF works the opposite way — it allows its stories to be shaped by what we know about technology and the universe and how they work. With a hard SF writer like Niven, the story emerges out of the world: the world and its rules and laws are what generate and drive and constrain the story. (MORE: A Century of Science Fiction) Which isn&#8217;t to say that Niven is constrained by what we now know to be possible. The &#8220;Known Space&#8221; stories and novels, for which he&#8217;s probably most famous, are far-future affairs that posit hyperdrives and nigh-invulnerable spaceship hulls and transfer booths (teleportation) and so on. But he allows this technology to be limited, or at<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=entertainment.time.com&#038;blog=24659518&#038;post=3502881&#038;subd=timeentertainment&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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