Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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It Should Have Ended With Bees
Plath chose to end her Ariel with four of the five-poem sequence Hughes buried in the middle, the so-called “bee poems.” When Sylvia Plath died, her husband Ted Hughes rearranged the poems in Ariel, Plath’s most famous collection, to reflect his…
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Online Ranting, Real-Life Raving
YA author Kathleen Hale became obsessed over a negative Goodreads review of her first novel, to the point of finding the reviewer’s address and deciding to stalk her in real life. She wrote about the experience on the Guardian last…
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Writing the Third Rail
My teacher’s point was, “Don’t write about race. It’s not worth it. It’s the third rail.” Over at Guernica, Grace Bello interviews Jess Row about his new book, Your Face In Mine, writing about race as a white man, identity, and…
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Boston, Take It or Leave It
Poe is more of a Bostonian than he liked to think, not in spite of but because of his criticism of the place, because of his keen awareness of the oft-commented upon socio-economic differences that still plague Boston today. Surprisingly,…
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The City Where Grown-Ups Live
Rumpus columnist Sari Botton has just published a new collection of essays, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. Over at Slate, you can read Elliott Kalan’s contribution, “The City Where Grown-Ups Live.”
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An Iconophobic Literature
While writing and text are often utilized in visual arts, peeking out in pictures or art installations, within the literary world photos and images are not always as welcome. Over at The Millions, Devin Kelly tries to shed light on…
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On Being a South Asian American
Tanuja Desai Hidier’s 2002 Born Confused was the first-ever South Asian American coming-of-age novel. At The Toast, she talks with Safy Hallan Farah about her debut book, its new sequel Bombay Blues, and future projects.
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Daniel Alarcòn Interviewed
[O]ne of the benefits of not having studied literature in a traditional sense is that my relationship with the canon is not, um, a tight relationship, not an embrace. Daniel Alarcòn sits down with Los Angeles Review of Books Editor in Chief…
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Literary Product Placement
George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t native advertising for Sparkling ICE and Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey… but a brand manager can dream. Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel wonders what would have happened if famous literary works were meant…
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Talking on The Other Side
I agree that The Other Side is, in part, about how I’ve learned to claim my body as my own, but it’s also about claiming my voice, and about how those two things are not as separate as you might…
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Tour Dreaming
Though she’s never been on a book tour herself, poet Lee Upton has a clear idea of what her dream tour would be: “like a cruise in one of those old movies.” She writes about it further on the Tin…
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The Feminist Novel
A feminist novel, then, is one that not only deals explicitly with the stories and thereby the lives of women; it is also a novel that illuminates some aspect of the female condition and/or offers some kind of imperative for…