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Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of […]

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I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.” “Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.” “Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.” […]