Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
-
Consider the Ellipsis
In the latest installment of Lexicon Valley over at Slate, Katy Waldman considers how to use an ellipsis with the aid of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.
-
Away We Go
Over at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain tackles the ambiguity on the use of “farther” and “further” in contemporary writing: Farther or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing, sometimes to the consternation of copy editors, a number of…
-
Many Happy Returns, Gregor Samsa!
My favorite version of the text—if only because it was the one that came to me when I most needed it—is the 1972 edition, translated and edited by Stanley Corngold, that my uncle handed me that day in Bogotá. Over…
-
Little White Lies
Over at the Ploughshares blog, Alex Chertok writes about every author’s necessary little white lies: As adults, we should hold each other’s work to high standards, and our own work to the highest of all. As writers, we shouldn’t settle for a…
-
An Exercise in Failure
I did give it up. I actually destroyed the manuscript, I even went on my friends computers and erased it.” He said he retrieved the text by searching in the email outbox of an old iMac computer. Marlon James, who…
-
Poetry and Topeka
There’s an old joke told among residents of Topeka, Kansas that goes like this: “What’s the difference between Topeka and yogurt?” “Yogurt has an active culture.” Over at Lit Hub, Amy Brady maps Kansas’s capital city of Topeka’s long tradition of…
-
Introducing: Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor is nothing if not overwhelming. Over at Electric Literature, Adrian Van Young has compiled a Flannery O’Connor reading primer to help those approaching the body of work of “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter,” just reissued…
-
A Language By Any Other Name
“Conlang” is short for “constructed language,” which is just what it sounds like: a language that has been constructed… conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for…
-
Debunking Motherhood
By writing Luz as a reluctant maternal figure, Watkins has tapped into the lean but vital tradition of fictional ambivalent mothers. The Rumpus’s own Lyz Lenz tackles maternal ambivalence in fiction in a review of Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut novel “Gold Fame Citrus” over at Salon.
-
Lolita in the Seventh Grade
Over at the Paris Review, Nick Antosca writes what it felt like to read Nabokov’s Lolita as a 12-year-old boy: Even if I didn’t quite grasp the nature of my radical misreading of the novel—Humbert’s a predator, not a competitor—I understood that for the majority of…
-
The Editor as an Explorer
Over at Electric Literature, John Freeman reveals what’s behind being an editor and the magic in finding fresh, compelling writing voices.
-
A Room of Father’s Own
Every young’un thinks they’re a rebel. But we can only build what we know, and from the space we have. Lincoln Michel writes about family and spaces in a great new short story over at Catapult.