Posts by author
Alex Norcia
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The Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge
The Baffler has a newly designed website, which includes all of its 25 issues, available for free. With so much talk about the New Yorker opening its digital gates this summer, let’s not forget “the Journal that Blunts the Cutting…
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The Science of Creativity
For the Atlantic, Cody C. Delistrarty ponders whether a person can learn to be creative, or if he or she is simply born with the trait. Framing his essay on Mary Shelley and her writing process for Frankenstein, Delistrarty presents several…
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All Shade, Dusty Books, and Lofty Conversation
Fresh out of college, Kaulie Lewis already feels nostalgic for the 150 or so books she completed as an English major. At The Millions, she discusses what she considers some of the most important novels she read in school and…
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The Literary Underground
Raphael Allison, at Guernica, fuses together his experience at this year’s MLA conference in Chicago with the subculture of the modernists in order to discuss the “crisis in the humanities”: Mods and literary academics are caught between the allure of wildness,…
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Starting Points
Following his essay, “The Art of Epigraph,” Jonathan Russell Clark turns to analyzing opening sentences at The Millions. He explores what makes contemporary and canonical first lines effective, and he contemplates, through several examples, whether or not there are identifiable…
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The Act of Un-Erasing
For the Atlantic, Shawn Miller argues that what we decide to erase, through our technology, is often more enlightening that what is kept. Drawing an analogy between Middle Age palimpsests and a 19th-century Italian priest, Angelo Mai, who dedicated his…
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Why We All Can’t Be J.K. Rowling
After a panel at the House of Commons about copyright issues, author Joanne Harris writes in the Telegraph about the difficulty of being successful within the publishing industry. Among other factors, she attributes some of the failure to readers’ misconceptions…
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The Very Short Story
In the Atlantic, Lydia Davis deconstructs two drafts of an early short story, showing how even something as minimal as a sentence or a paragraph can have a narrative arc.
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Are You My Mother?
At The Millions, Anna Solomon asks what it means that “literature is filled with disappearing mothers”: Why so much motherly abandonment? It makes for good conflict, of course. It can help define characters and set plots in motion. Most importantly, it’s an act…
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Gay is the New Vampire
In an essay at The Millions, Alex Kalamaroff praises the growing number of LGBTQ characters in young adult fiction. He wonders, however, why there’s such a disparity between YA and adult fiction, especially considering that many between the ages of…
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Teen Reading
At BuzzFeed Books, Anne Helen Petersen expresses nostalgia for the reading she did as a teenager. It’s not so much that she misses the books themselves, though, but rather the “style of reading” associated with being a teen, the kind of…
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A Library’s Trash
Mark Luce, who teaches literature and history at the Barstow School in Kansas City, has a new column at Electric Literature, reviewing books that he and the school’s librarian have recently removed from the collection. His first “Discarded Pile” post…