Friends of the Dickens Forum,

     Lin-Manuel Miranda had caught our eye and interest, and Bob Patten 
<[log in to unmask]> wants us all to know
what his NYT interview may mean to us, particularly the teachers:        
                             (pjm0
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Dear Patrick,

For all those teachers who have to persuade their classes, and all the 
students to have to be persuaded, that /A Tale of Two Cities/ or /Bleak 
House/ is worth slogging through, here's a tribute to Dickens published 
in the /New York Times Book Review/, 10 April 2016, p. 8, from 
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the Broadway smash hit, the 
hip-hop musical /Hamilton/, sold out through January 2017 already:

I’m most in awe of novelists, who move sets, lights, scenery, and act 
out all the parts in your mind for you. My kind of writing [for the 
theater] requires collaboration with others to truly ignite. But I think 
of Dickens, or Cervantes, or Márquez, or Morrison, and I can describe to 
you the worlds they paint and inhabit. To engender empathy and create a 
world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic.

Yes!

Bob Patten