Posts by author
Ashley Perez
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Is the Great American Novel Still a Thing?
Adam Kirsch is breaking down the need for and the existence of the Great American Novel at Harvard Magazine: But of course, if the American Dream weren’t still alive, somewhere in our culture and our minds, it wouldn’t be necessary for…
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Make Reading a New Year’s Resolution!
The folks over at BOOKish have a wonderful idea: add reading to your list of New Year’s resolutions. They have helpful hints for how you can accomplish this: “Read a new author It’s so difficult to determine which authors are…
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Social Justice and the Power of Twitter
Rumpus editor Roxane Gay has a new essay at Salon discussing the power of Twitter and empathy in the wake of the Justine Sacco scandal. Social media can give people a voice in situations where those voices are usually silenced, but,…
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The Iraq War in Fiction
“Fiction is, of course, serving rearguard here; the last decade has seen Iraq War films, poetry collections, documentaries, and non-fiction books too numerous to list, but part of what’s appealing about examining American Iraq War fiction now is that there…
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The Value of Art
The importance of art to society is unquestionable, even more so to fellow artists but sometimes the questions is raised, What is art for? “We value historical information of this kind for various reasons: because we want to understand more…
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The Accidental Buddhist
“When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other than the pampered-sounding Frenchman, who notes, at the very beginning…
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A new way to measure time
At the New York Times, Chris Huntington writes an essay about how working with prisoners taught him to reevaluate how he measured time, as well as his successes and failures. “When the battery in my watch died, I still wore…
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Is Your City Killing Your Creativity?
Expensive cities are killing our creativity, argues Sarah Kendzior in an article for Al Jazeera. Not only is it very difficult for artists to make a basic living in artistic hubs such as New York, but some are pretty much…
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Fugazi Meets the Library of Congress
Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye gave a talk at the Washington D.C. Library of Congress about digital archiving and the need to educate creators. The landscape of archiving one’s work has dramatically changed in recent decades as everything can be instantly…
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Think you know The Night Before Christmas? Think Again.
Alexandra Socarides gives a clear warning at the beginning of this article that she doesn’t want to ruin anyone’s Christmas, but you should probably read the original poem one last time before reading her breakdown at the Los Angeles Review…
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A Family Tradition
“Maybe it’s the glow from the new miniature lamppost from the Caroler collection my brother ordered that literally cast my mother’s dolls in a new light or the realization that they’ve been with our family for so long, but I’m…
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Looking at Spent: A Memoir
Rumpus contributor Antonia Crane‘s forthcoming memoir, Spent, is getting some great reviews ahead of its early 2014 release. Check out what the Library Journal has to say: “VERDICT This is not an antiprostitution diatribe, but is instead one woman’s account of…