Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Indiana, Where Art Thou?
No, I’m thinking of mythology, that America of Madison Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, the Alamo and Antietam. In this spiritual landscape, Indiana isn’t misunderstood. It’s ignored. Over at Electric Literature, Adam Fleming Patty looks for some literary fortune in his infamous…
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Literary Tripping
All of which adds up to a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into…
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Speculating in Bangkok
Yet the more I imagined this scene, the more I had read between the novels of Bukowski’s lowly dredge through life and Dick’s mind-bending canon of science fiction, I began to see more and more of an affinity between the…
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Repressed Reading
That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? Why? And, more to the point, how? How do you approach literature when you find it…
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The Eye of the Writer
She sent me this photograph and wrote: I run across my own life as a dog runs across a field, zigzag. The search is endless. Then I come to a sudden stop. I stand and listen to the small movements…
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Iowa’s Ring of Fire
“One day,” he said, “you’re going to have a bad time in workshop. A really bad time. Maybe Frank is in a foul mood and you’ve pissed off a few people around the table for whatever reason—your insufficient love of…
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Riding With the Queen
Over at the New York Times, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles Toni Morrison in a tremendous essay: Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in order to do the work. The work “protects,” she told…
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Unlike Friends
All we knew was that Casper, with his genius IQ, his measured laugh, his wicked weltanschauung, was somebody really, really interesting to hang out with. A neighborhood kid like anybody else, only not like anybody else. One of us, only…
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Tautophrases and Narcissism
In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like “You do you” and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-evolving, ever more complicated narcissism. Colson Whitehead examines the relationship between “tautophrases” and contemporary narcissism…
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Friends Indeed
Well, one of things we have in common as writers is that we don’t work too much from personal experience. So, I feel like there’s a constant desire for readers to find parallels between one’s life and one’s work. And…
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Writing War From Afar
It was a really big deal for me that a Sri Lankan publisher picked it up. I didn’t grow up there, and I didn’t go through [the war], so there’s always been a question of legitimacy. When I was at…
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Teaching German During the Arab Spring
Where am I from, ask the Arabs: “Woher kommen Sie, Sai-ed Maruan,” and I answer that I’m from Germany, but that I’m also from Palestine. Had I ever been to Palestine, the Arabs want to know. I’ve been to Palestine…