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a culture more enamored of prurient gossip than of literature itself

[...] Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. I…

there is punitive, vituperative quality in the published reviews

the irresistible odalisques sprawled across his dorm bed