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Maira Kalman
Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman is an American illustrator, writer, and photographer. Known for her unique visual style and sense of humor, her work spans a variety of formats from children's books to adult literature. Her illustrations often appear in The New Yorker, and are celebrated for their distinctive perspective and observations of everyday life. more

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“I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.”

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Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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