Posts by author
Alex Norcia
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Fetishizing Cuba
For The New Republic, Ryan Kearney responds to those claiming that American tourism and investment will ruin Cuba’s romanticism: If you visit Cuba to puff cigars, get drunk on rum-and-cokes or mojitos, read Hemingway, and fetishize the country’s dilapidation with your…
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Reserved for the Dead and Dignified
For the New Yorker’s “Inner Worlds,” Colum McCann writes about his father’s writing shed, and Teju Cole shares his experience of watching (and rewatching) Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Red.”
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Staring Our Idols in the Face
For the Guardian, Roxane Gay sums up 2014 not so much as “public figures falling from grace… as we, the public, lowering our pedestals and staring our idols in the face.”
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Who Was Your First Kiss?
At the New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott covers “A Brief History of Kissing in Movies.”
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The Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box…
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The Real Crisis
Along with the other onslaught of reactions to The New Republic’s mass resignation, George Packer offers his own response at the New Yorker, suggesting that the “collapse” (along with the recent Rolling Stone debacle) shows a “crisis” in journalism: The…
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Plain Speaker or Liar
According to the Guardian, Dr. Luke Seaber of University College London has uncovered evidence in the London Metropolitan archives that confirms George “Orwell did indeed carry out, more or less as described, one of his ‘down-and-out’ experiments”: he went to…
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2014: The Year of the Debut
Though he admits that “it can be a little silly to sum up an entire year of books,” Electric Literature’s Lincoln Michel suggests that “2014 might be the year of the debut.”
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In Defense of The Novel
For the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman responds to David Shields’s Reality Hunger, primarily using Anna Karenina to defend the powers of the novel.
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Is Our Art Failing Us?
In his “Cross Cuts” column for the New York Times, A.O. Scott explains how, “in the midst of [our] hard times,” he feels as if “art is failing us.” Following his introductory essay, he asked a group of panelists some…
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Reading: A National Priority
At Salon, James Patterson speaks with Erin Keane about his upcoming campaign to encourage reading, including “a television ad featuring a public book burning, and a request to President Obama that he pledge to make reading a national priority.”