Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
-
To Pimp Postmodernism
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Casey Michael Henry considers Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly a new bid to revive a “Black Postmodernism”: Not only does the album fulfill many specific qualities of postmodernism, and postmodernism specifically shaped…
-
Writing the Oral History of Our Time
Nearly everything Gould ever held in his hands slipped away. He lost his glasses; he lost his teeth. “I keep losing fountain pens, change, and even manuscripts,” he wrote. “I lost my diary in the toilet,” he reported one day.…
-
Dry Magazines
Desert managed, impressively, to publish lively, intelligent writing about a very dry place, month after month. Dan Piepenbring browsed through archive.org’s huge magazine collection to discover Desert, a publication from the Southwest entirely devoted to… deserts! You can read more…
-
The Way You Write
Using the second person is a tricky but effective writing device, though its use is pretty uncommon. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre offers some clever examples of writing in the second person.
-
A Different Kind of Spinster
I’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more…
-
To Talk To a Mockingbird
In 1978, while writing Gregory Peck’s biography, Michael Freedman had the privilege of talking on the phone with Harper Lee, resulting in possibly the only interview the author ever gave. Now, he writes about their conversation over at the Guardian: I…
-
Murder by Numbers
Over at the Ploughshares blog, Rebecca Makkai puts together a series of graphs depicting ironically depressing stats about books and writers.
-
A New Tool Based On Old Racialism
While concerns over the accuracy and invasiveness of the technology are important, the primary fear I have is that the technology available today masks a form of gender and racial stereotyping with the scientific authority of genetics. Heather Dewey-Hagborg considers…
-
Playing a Book
When I got older, I discovered that this sense of play wasn’t limited to the young. There were plenty of adults out there writing radically experimental books formally guided by the notion that a book could be more than a…
-
The Gentrified City by the Bay
Now, I was wondering if you could help me get something to eat. You wouldn’t be just handing me money to do whatever with — I know that’s a concern for some people. You could go with me to a…
-
Reality Starvation
Fiction-making is so much fun that many nonfiction writers prefer to make up stuff. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, David Freeman considers the importance of the imperceptible, heavily traversed boundary between fiction and reality in literature.
-
My Mother Would Be Right
But seeing them beating that man on television, it must have scared me so deep, in a place so hidden, that I didn’t even know about it. My brain kept playing as though I were a regular teenager. But my…