From In Search of a Concrete Music, by composer Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95), published last year for the first time in English by University of California Press. Published in French in…

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From a January 22 report by New Mexico State Police officer Clinton Norris. Tanner Ruane and Mark Staake were arrested before they carried out their plan and are awaiting trial.…

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By Lydia Davis, published in the 2013 issue of NOON. Davis’s “Five Stories from Flaubert” appeared in the November 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. I’m simply not interested in reading…

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By Claude Lévi-Strauss, from a 1986 lecture at the Ishizaka Foundation in Tokyo, included in Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World, published last month by Harvard University Press.…

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From the unpublished diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham (1847–65), son of John J. Gresham, twice mayor of Macon, Georgia. LeRoy, a longtime invalid confined to his bed or to a…

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By Hafiz (c. 1320–89), published in the November/December 2012 issue of The American Poetry Review. Translated by Matthew Rohrer, who consulted earlier English versions rather than the Persian.

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From Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985, out this month from Princeton University Press. Franco Maria Ricci, a publisher, commissioned Calvino to prepare a text for a volume containing reproductions of the…

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By Christa Wolf, from City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolf, who spent most of her life in East…

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From open letters by the actor Gérard Depardieu, addressed to French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and to the Russian press. In January, Depardieu obtained Russian citizenship in order to evade…

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From the October 29, 2012, testimony of Martin Dumont to a Canadian public inquiry into corruption charges against various Montreal city officials. Dumont was an organizer for Union Montréal, the…

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By Jonathan Lethem, from “More Little Tales of the Internet,” published in Issue 59 of Conjunctions. Lethem is the author of many books, including, most recently, Fear of Music. His…

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From Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress: Learn to Play the Most Complex Video Game Ever Made, by Peter Tyson, published last year by O’Reilly Media, Inc. When a “strange mood”…

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From A Brochure for Comprehending the Cultures of the Coalition Forces, a twenty-eight-page pamphlet published by the Afghan Ministry of Defense and distributed to Afghan troops. Translated from the Dari…

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From an interview with children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, by British journalist Emma Brockes, published in the November/December 2012 issue of The Believer. Sendak, whose many works include…

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From Here and Now, a collection of letters exchanged by novelists J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster between 2008 and 2011, out this month from Viking. 24 august 2009 Dear…

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From an October 9, 2012, email sent by Lucy Bird, then chief executive of Marketing Edinburgh, to city councillors Sue Brice and Alastair Maclean, during the development of an ad…

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By Peter Andreas, from his book out this month from Oxford University Press. Andreas is a professor of political science at Brown University. The agents moved in to seize the…

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From a November 19, 2012, blog post by John McAfee, the founder of the antivirus-software company McAfee, who in mid-November came under suspicion by Belizean police of murdering his neighbor…

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From the October 23, 2012, dissenting opinion of Judge Robert Smith in a case brought by the operators of Nite Moves, a strip club near Albany, against New York State’s…

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From a twenty-seven-page letter by Anders Behring Breivik sent last October to corrections officials in Norway. Breivik is currently serving a twenty-one-year sentence in a maximum-security prison near Oslo for…

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From a September 12, 2012, post by The Mittani, a member of the Goonswarm alliance in the role-playing game Eve Online, on a website that provides news about the fictional…

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