Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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The Brilliant Translator
Over at Guernica, Katrina Dodson interviews Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, about the mysterious Italian writer, the final Neapolitan novel, and the meaning of life: Whether you’re a writer or not, you can imagine looking at your life and thinking,…
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Talking Pity
After I wrote Pity, I assumed only women would read it and men would mock even the idea of it. I think this lazy premonition was a result of receiving feedback years prior from a male editor that told me…
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The Next Day
The late David Bowie was a great inspiration for many different authors. Over at Electric Literature, some of them—including Aleksander Hemon, Porochista Khakpour, Ru Freeman, Amber Sparks, and Marie-Helene Bertino—reveal how the British artist influenced their life and work.
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Letting Whiteness Go
Over at Salon, Erik Anderson tackles the “implicit whiteness of Literature,” hoping for a VIDA-like count devoted to writers of color.
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Reshaping Humanities in the Middle East
Though every time I hear it, I can’t help but cringe a little. It reeks of insularity. Have you read what’s coming out of the Arab world right now? I thought when I heard that question again this year. That’s…
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Recipes for a New Life
I subsisted on Cliff bars, Cuban coffee, and Trader Joe’s wine. The only real habit of my old life that made it over to my new life was reading. In fact I became even more alive with reading than I…
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New Year’s Rant
For this I hate New Years. I want every morning to be a new year for me. I want to evaluate my life every day and renew my life every day. No days budgeted for rest. I choose when to…
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Tropical Islands of Privilege
Over at the New Yorker, Ottessa Moshfegh has a new short story, “The Beach Boy.” Moshfegh also sat down with Deborah Treisman to talk further about her writing: Isn’t it hilarious when people are blind to their own arrogance? For some, no amount of…
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Better Read Saul
Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. At The Daily Beast, Michael Weiss writes a long and thoughtful essay on Saul Bellow and his often overlooked…
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Dissecting the Essay
How does an essay comes to its final shape? What’s the morphology of nonfiction’s popular form? Over at the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre dissects works by Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson to get…
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A Woman, A Part, A Movie, A Campaign
Of all possible women characters, how did I ever end up writing about an actress? Having spent two decades making films and art about women’s experiences from a feminist perspective, I realized that actresses are the ultimate representation of women—they…
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The Queen(s) of Fiction
I write historical fiction. Some consider this an outré craft. If literary fiction is Brooklyn, the historical novel is Queens. Over at the New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, Geraldine Brooks pens an essay on her experience recapturing the consciousness…