The Marginalian
The Marginalian

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Great Writers Reflect on the Divide Between Private Person and Public Persona in Hand-Drawn Self-Portraits
Great Writers Reflect on the Divide Between Private Person and Public Persona in Hand-Drawn Self-Portraits

“Only the crazed and the privileged permit themselves the luxury of disintegration into more than one self.”

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Duke Ellington’s Artistry and Artifice: How the Jazz Icon Engineered His Own Image
Duke Ellington’s Artistry and Artifice: How the Jazz Icon Engineered His Own Image

“Ellington [was] a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote, and God knows what other saints and sinners that were apt to pop out of his ever-changing personality.”

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Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers
Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

Hemingway, Didion, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Morrison, Orwell, Le Guin, Woolf, and other titans of literature.

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The Nature of the Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write
The Nature of the Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write

“Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.”

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Full Spectrum 2012: 10 Books on Sensemaking for the TED Bookstore
Full Spectrum 2012: 10 Books on Sensemaking for the TED Bookstore

A reading list for combinatorial creativity.

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A Very Large Head: The Phrenology of George Eliot
A Very Large Head: The Phrenology of George Eliot

“She is extremely feminine & gentle; & the great strength of her intellect combined with this quality renders her very interesting.”

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Charles Bukowski on Writing and His Crazy Daily Routine
Charles Bukowski on Writing and His Crazy Daily Routine

“Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.”

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The Daily Routines of Great Writers
The Daily Routines of Great Writers

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

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Ounce Dice Trice: Exploring the Whimsy of Words in Extraordinary Names for Ordinary Things
Ounce Dice Trice: Exploring the Whimsy of Words in Extraordinary Names for Ordinary Things

Cartography for the land of linguistic imagination.

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Visions of the Jinn: A Visual History of Arabian Nights
Visions of the Jinn: A Visual History of Arabian Nights

From Aladdin to Lewis Carroll, or what Buddhist deities have to do with understanding the Middle East.

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