Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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How Not to Break
For NYT Magazine, Wils S. Hylton tackles the myth of Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling nonfiction author who never really leaves her house: She is cut off not only from basic tools of reporting, like going places and seeing things, but also…
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Birdwatching
Over at Grantland, Mark Harris looks back on the stories Hollywood told this year, why marquee films are gridlocking the industry, and what that sort of thing can do to your head: “I did not begin 2014 by imagining that the…
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A Brief History of James
Brook Stephenson’s nabbed an interview with Marlon James—the two chat about Salman Rushdie, the black hobbit argument, and the difference between The Book You Want to Write and The Book You Think You Should Write: “I read lots of great…
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Voting With Champions
A roundtable of authors choose their favorite Vonnegut work for The Oyster Review. Unsurprisingly, Cat’s Cradle came out ahead with a pretty strong hand.
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Over 300 Characters
At Electric Literature, Elisa Gabbert’s finally collected what we never knew we needed: a compendium of the year’s most essential literary tweets.
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Blatant Hybrid
Over at The Believer, Ratik Asokan chats with Claudia Rankine about Citizen, art, and how we’re constantly updating our principles: We will always fail each other. That goes without saying. The question is, what happens next? If failing is then…
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Lost Daughter
The NYRB gives a profile of Elena Ferrante and her Naples novels, but the only thing more alluring than the author’s anonymity is the prose itself: There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of…
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New York, Collected
At the New Yorker, Valeria Luiselli gives us an essay in defense of monuments, libraries, park benches, daughters, Dickinson, and ‘simplicissimusses’: In that first New York of my early twenties, I decided that I despised writers who admitted to crying…
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Since We Last Spoke
Paul Ford touches on the delicate art of reconnecting over email, after years and years of silence, for Medium.
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Willful Ignorance
Over at the New Yorker, Alaksandar Hemon reads a slice of Nabokov; afterward, he chats about the foreignness of language, learning English from Pnin, and the book’s “complicated innocence” towards America.
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Open Window
Jessica Gross riffs on Matteo Pericoli for the LARB, where she stands in support of the cosmopolitan. Her essay ruminates on place in art, foreign inspiration, and the mystique underlying location: The obvious motive — to discover how artists work,…
