Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Between the World and Ta-Nehisi Coates
Over at the Guardian, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks to Tim Adams about the success of Between the World and Me, racism, and drawing inspiration from James Baldwin: It’s more Baldwin understood that if you are going to say something important about the world it…
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Judging the Judges
This year’s judges of the National Book Award seem to agree that women’s nonfiction writing is abundant and prize-worthy. The 2015 nonfiction longlist includes seven female-authored books, out of 10, the largest percentage of female nominees in the prize’s history.…
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Drawing History
For the next hour or so, we shifted in our seats, tense and transfixed. It felt like I was witnessing history, a dialogue I’d mostly been exposed to on the internet being brought forth into real life and vocalized by…
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Propelling Stories
Catapult.co, a new literary website and publishing startup powered by Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, debuted online yesterday. It features, among an impressive list of fiction and nonfiction pieces, a stunning essay about living in New York by Alexander Chee.
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A Body of Writing
The body in writing is a vessel to feeling—to empathy. Reading Lidia Yuknavitch, Maggie Nelson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, is to feel. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the presence of the body in writing, focusing on…
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Introducing The Scofield
Welcome online to The Scofield, a brand new lit mag inspired by Scofield Thayer’s legendary The Dial. Edited by Tyler Malone, Dustin Illingworth, and Scott Cheshire, The Scofield aims for all its readers “to transcend our loneliness, to populate our solitude with…
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By Bukowski’s Rules
On Writing, a new collection of musings on the writing life by Charles Bukowski, is coming out on August 27th from HarperCollins. In the meantime, you can head over to Lit Hub to find a preview of the book disclosing the master’s…
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American Horror Fiction
How we ended up in those backwoods hills was Iris said we needed to ‘get a little air,’ and Dolan added, ‘country air!’ and that was that. Iris was my lover, and Dolan was her roommate I’d never liked. All…
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Don’t (Blurb) Speak
Wallace coined the helpful term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about…
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African/American
Although all-things “African” had been exalted in my house, this was not the case for project kids at P.S. 40, nor the “best of the brightest” at P.S/I.S. 308. It was at those places where I learned that there was…
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On Writing and Garlic
Welcoming Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, a new collection of Shirley Jackson’s writings out today from Random House, the New Yorker offers a three-installment series of lectures on writing by the seminal author excerpted from the book: “Memory…
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Writing Homosexuality in Africa
Within the past five years, we’ve seen a sea change in attitudes towards homosexuality by writers, in part a response to virulent anti-homosexual legislation in key locations. Writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina have been very open about…