Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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Chicana Fabulosa
Michele Serros passed away from cancer earlier this year, but her influence—and her infectiousness—lives through just about everyone/thing/place she encountered; Jessica Langlois shares a glimpse of that at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Michele believed her stories deserved to…
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Kinky Reggae
Over at the New York Review of Books, Luc Sante riffs on living through reggae in the late seventies: I bought the record at the time it was on the Jamaican charts, from some punk store in downtown Manhattan. I…
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Believe Me
Over at NYT Magazine, Etgar Keret slips us an essay on teaching his son the art of forgiveness: The minute we got into the taxi, I had a bad feeling. It wasn’t because the driver asked me impatiently to buckle…
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Our Own Private Lives
Daniel Alarcón interviews Alejandro Zambra for BOMB Magazine; among other things, they touch on William Carlos Williams, Chile, bonsai trees, dictators, and beautiful notebooks.
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The Secrets of the Past
Over at the New Yorker, a journalist returns to what was almost the last town he ever reported on.
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Now and Then
At the Telegraph, Mario Vargas Llosa drops some wisdom on the state of literature: “I remember when I was young,” he continues, “to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic, because you were so isolated from the common…
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Everybody’s Out of Town
The Village Voice revisits Ellen Willis’s trip out of New York and into herself. Among other quips, Willis offers that “on a long bus trip, the different between a tolerable ride and a miserable ride is having two seats to yourself.…
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Multilingual Farce
David Samuels fact checks Herman Melville down at Lapham’s Quarterly: Who Herman Melville was and what he actually thought about anything are altogether unsatisfying questions that have never been answered in a satisfying way. This has led critics from the…
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Off the Island
Marlon James writes about leaving home for the New York Times Magazine: In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be.…
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Skipping Tracks
Laura van den Berg gifts us a playlist over at Electric Literature, composed of songs she listened to while writing Find Me; among other gems, she’s into Grizzly Bear, Hot Chip, and the obligatory Joy Division.
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Keeping Up with Cortázar
Over at the Times, Hugo Passarello chronicles Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch through a revolving photo essay; in his own way, Passarello bridges the gap between written text and daily living (or at least does his best to keep up with Cortázar).