Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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Eschew Beastly Adjectives
A rediscovered 35-year-old letter from Roald Dahl dispenses advice to a young writer in his trademark irascible fashion. After scolding the letter writer for “asking to much of [him],” Dahl offers this and other craft gems: . . . eschew…
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Writing Happiness
Michelle Tea talks with Bustle about her new memoir How to Grow Up, motherhood, Botox, and what it’s like to write about things being good: It’s the first time I’ve ever worked on a piece of writing where I’m writing…
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Books Save Lives
You know all those movies in which a character is shot in the chest, only to be miraculously saved by a pocket Bible, and everyone in the audience rolls their eyes? Well, it turns out that books actually are bulletproof—to…
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In the Name of Fear
It’s very hard to imagine a president getting up and talking about how damaging the fear of terrorism has been to us, culturally and politically, and how much it’s horribly undermined us. Looking at torture and all the other things…
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Memoir by Guantanamo Prisoner Published
After partial redaction and six years of legal battles, Guantanamo Diary is now the first-ever published book by a current Guantanamo detainee. Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned there since 2002, and his memoir details his thirteen years of confinement…
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Queen Joan
The act of anointing Joan Didion as our favorite, our best, our everything, is the act that reveals what we’re trying to say: that we’re cool, that we’re educated, that if we are not young and white and slender and…
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The Great American Novel(s)?
This idea — that one person, and only one person, in any given generation can possess the intellectual prowess, creative might, emotional intelligence and writing chops to produce a novel that speaks truth about the disparate American whole — is…
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Who Robbed Mark Twain’s Grave?
Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, a dastardly criminal (or Mark Twain superfan) stole a bronze plaque of Twain’s profile from his gravestone in Elmira, N.Y. At Melville House, former Elmira resident Alex Shephard examines the city’s complicated relationship with…
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Never Change
The LA Review of Books talks with Meghan Daum about her wildly successful new essay collection, The Unspeakable, catharsis, and redemption (or the lack thereof): I think what tends to be truly unspeakable in our current culture is not when…
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Authors Stand with Charlie Hebdo
As the world continues to mourn the 12 dead in Wednesday’s terrorist attack on the controversial French magazine Charlie Hebdo, satirists, cartoonists, writers, and editors have come together with PEN America to stand against the attack and bolster the necessity of…
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Writing the Invisible
The work of the writer has always been about making the invisible visible. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, talks to Salon about Ferguson and fear, selfies and tattoos, and what it means to be a writer in the…
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Always Read the Comments
Art isn’t just for fans, which means that it’s not just for the knowledgeable, but for passersby as well. Expertise, then, seems an excuse to make everyone talk about the same things in the same way. For the LA Review…