Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Monday, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction was awarded to Jack Livings for The Dog, a collection set in China in the last decades of the 20th century. What makes Livings’s stories remarkable isn’t just the tight…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Okey-Pankey treated us to not one, but two flash fiction stories from Padgett Powell, whose third collection of short stories, Cries for Help, Various, is forthcoming this September as the first title from the new Electric Literature/Black Balloon…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This is the week of fantastical fiction, of the weird and the magical, of re-imagining fairy tales and urban legends, of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. On Tuesday, a new edition of Angela Carter’s seminal 1979 story…
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YA’s Last Taboo
Sex scenes in YA, the kind that (gulp) turn us on and make our cheeks flush and get our hearts racing, have never been more important than they are now. Stories that give protagonists flesh and bone and heart and…
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Books for Ladies
When an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own…
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R.I.P. Formal Writing
Let’s consider that we are seeing a natural movement towards a society in which language is more oral—or in the case of texting, oral-style—where written prose occupies a much smaller space than it used to. As such—might we stop pretending…
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Brave New Words
This year in the decline of the English language, Dictionary.com has added words like “slacktivism,” “lifehack,” and “basic,” according to the Dictionary.com blog. On the positive side, they finally added definitions for gender-inclusive words like “agender,” “bigender,” and “gender-fluid,” and…
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Controversial Comics
Cartoonists tend to stick together because they have to; . . . their work is disproportionately singled out for suppression both abroad and in the U.S., while at the same time often regarded as not “serious” enough to deserve a…
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Art vs. Politics
In a truly wonderful keynote speech reprinted at Lit Hub, Aminatta Forna tears down the false divide between art and politics: To tell writers not to tackle political themes because it will spoil the beauty of their work sounds very…
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Thank You, Hypertext
The book was, we can now see, crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires. At the Guardian, Billy…
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How to Be Less Boring
At Huffington Post, novelist Matthew Dicks has some good suggestions for making author appearances less boring, including not actually reading from your novel.
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The Scatology of Karl Ove Knausgaard
Finally, the Paris Review answers the question we’ve all been wondering about Karl Ove Knausgaard and his mega-novel My Struggle: what’s with all the shitting? That gratuitous attention to detail may explain why these scenes jump out at readers, but…