Great Regulars: Quite a lot of this power

has to do with the script that the Coen brothers boiled down from [Cormac] McCarthy's already lean prose. It tells the camera what to do, the characters what to say, and makes a ridiculous situation frighteningly believable, and tense. This ought to be on studio heads' minds as they go to the bargaining table for the fourth week of the Writers Guild of America's strike.

from John Freeman: The Guardian: theblogbooks: Everybody needs writers

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Finally, in poetry, there was some enjambment, as they say. Three books straddled first place: a massive new translation of Zbigniew Herbert's Selected Poems, along with two volumes of recent US poet laureates, Robert Hass (Time and Materials) and Robert Pinsky (Gulf Music). The list was rounded by Rae Armantrout (Next Life) and Mary Jo Bang (Elegy).

from John Freeman: The Guardian: theblogbooks: The year's best books? We do the math

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