Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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Native Transplant
Rumpus contributor J. Ryan Stradal edited the recently published California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Gold State, Number 2. The anthology’s goal? To find the best new practitioners of Californian prose. Down at LARB, Dinah Lenney quizzes Stradal on just how…
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From a Distance
Over at The Believer, Zack Rogow and Renee Morel have unearthed French novelist Colette’s advice column for the forlorn: You who love “madly,” have you decided, accepted, that one day love will disappear from your life? Permit me to be…
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A Losing Game
I imagined if I had been writing in the 1950s and 1960s, I, too, may have been writing for the pulps. I got the sense that [Jim] saw me as a kindred spirit, that I reminded him of himself as…
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Standing Ovation
Over at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh gives Chris Rock the profile treatment. Sanneh touches on the business of comedy, dueling aesthetics, and the trouble with staying relevant in an age of irrelevance: On set, whenever someone complimented Rock’s performance…
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A Proper Fake
Wells Towers gives GQ yet another essay. His subject this time? The most prolific counterfeiter in American history, Frank Bourassa: Frank’s self-image may be described as not merely healthy but hyperpituitary. When I asked him where he found the lunatic…
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Loose Notes
Gil-Scott Heron was a man of many fragments, and Marcus Baram is intent on unearthing all of them: Gil did marathon writing sessions, staying up for days, taking a break every once in a while to play cards in the…
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What We Eventually Remember
Over at PEN, Emily St. John Mandel chats about forming an identity: I’d been a dancer all my life but didn’t really want to dance anymore. I spent a great deal of time scheming desperately to get back to New…
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Duly Sympathetic
Over at BOMB, Claudia Rankine takes a look at the way we use our words: Tone is an everyday kind of maneuver. It disrupts and communicates aggression, disgust, dis- respect, and humor, among a myriad of possibilities, thereby allowing language…
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Hasta la Madre
At the New Yorker, Francisco Goldman tackles the malaise shadowing his favorite city in the world: Mexico City feels different these days. Its usual vibrancy has been muted, and not only because of the missing students of Ayotzinapa. Paéz tells me that…
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City Resolution
Author Chris Colin finally brought his daughter to New York, after years and years away, and it may as well have been a new city: I began seeing grand indifference everywhere. The immigrant struggles against waves of economic indifference. The chaos…
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Leaving Lebanon
Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine gets the profile treatment at NYRB: Many of the funniest moments in Alameddine’s work—and he is essentially a comic writer—revolve around the difficulties of trying to escape the past. The heroes of his fiction are all…
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Apollo Revisited
Tom Hanks (yeah, that one), lands his short fiction debut over at the New Yorker: I’ve been around great storytellers all my life and, like an enthusiastic student, I want to tell some of my own. And I read so…