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…
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Alex Norcia
165 posts
Alex Norcia is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in VICE, The Millions, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, Word Riot, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is an editor-at-large at The Offing.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…