Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Literary Resolutions
Authors, editors, and publishers make New Year’s resolutions, too. Head over to Electric Literature to discover what, among others, Emily Gould, Catherine Lacey, Mitchell S. Jackson, Lincoln Michel, Alex Gilvarry, and Jason Diamond are committing to for 2015.
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Welcome, Literary 2015!
The Millions has just released its annual overview of what the first half of 2015 will offer when it comes to new literature. “[A]t 9,000 words strong and encompassing 91 titles,” the preview is a pretty intense read itself.
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Writing the Holidays
Sometimes we forget that many of the books and plays we know so very well are set during holiday festivities. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi reminds us of “holidays and traditions in literature.”
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Practicing Yoga with Sylvia Plath
This is the Plath poem I relate the most to shavasana. You sink down, you bubble back up. The Duchess of Nothing in yoga pants. For Carrie Frye, yoga practice and Sylvia Plath are inherently tied. She explains why in…
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Unpacking Patrick Modiano
Any author writing about contemporary experience in their own country can be seen as providing some kind of historical record. Modiano, however, goes further. His oeuvre – upward of twenty novels, plus poetry, plays and children’s fiction – acts as…
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Public Domain Has It
My heart pounded and my breath choked in my windpipe. I had stumbled on an accidental mention of a totally unfamiliar race. Obviously non-Terrestrial. Yet, to the characters in the book, it was perfectly natural—which suggested they belonged to the…
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Joan Didion and Me
All of that is to say that because Tom Wolfe and because James Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, but because Didion most of all, an American essay today without the sudden and revelatory personal aside is hardly…
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Loosen the Reins
To an outside observer, it might appear that my father approached death the same way he did life: With a heavy hand and a critical gaze. It may seem like his pride and stubbornness made something difficult — dying —…
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Ride with the Devil
What I should have learned back then, but did not, and in fact took at least another twenty years to fully learn, is that such claims are not at all about “demonic power,” “demonic possession,” or even “the Devil,” but…
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Not That Kind of Narrator
The problem with unreliable narrators — and the thing that makes them so delightful to read in fiction — is that by design, you never quite know when they are telling the truth. Which makes it a stunningly poor choice…
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Excavating Pain
Fittingly ending the memoir with a scene at the La Brea Tar Pits, which trapped and fossilized the unfortunate prehistoric creatures who wandered into them, Ortiz speaks of her personal excavation as a perpetual journey, a necessary exploration of a…