Matthew Pearl Quotes
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Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.
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Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
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As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
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Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word 'Dickensian' could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.
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When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
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If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.
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When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.
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I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.
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Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.
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For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.
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Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.
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Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.
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I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
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With James Reese’s vivid and chilling novel, readers will gain a whole new appreciation of two gothic landmarks, Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Not only does The Dracula Dossier grip us with its fast paced hunt for history’s most notorious killer, it also enchants us with sophisticated and lyrical recreations of its unique period and strong characters. A daring achievement.
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I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.
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Up until the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States and the United Kingdom did not recognize copyright in each other's creative works.
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Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.
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'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
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One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.
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I was fortunate that Yale has a very open and creative law school. I took many courses outside the law school, and every semester, the students had a literature reading group. I was asked to lead one on 'Dante and the Concept of Justice,' and it was around that time that I began writing the novel.
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My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.
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I had a dog named Oliver with severe separation anxiety. He couldn't be alone... so I had to bring him wherever I went.
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I love writing shorter fiction.
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The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.