The [anti-Shakespeare] theories are always pinned on two points,

We look at different facets, different relationships, the same relationship at different points in time. We look sometimes at the whole town and sometimes at individual relationships, and by the time we're done you have a sense of having met the people of this town.

It was 25 basis points, everyone knew that, and so there's virtually no stock market reaction,

It was more exacting than Shakespeare. Every stammer was scripted.

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

We probably don't have the depth to compete as a team with some of the best in the state, but both of these players should be contenders.