Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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A Feminist Education
As I continue reading Gay’s book, I can’t help but think of how my definition of myself as a feminist has evolved over the years. Looking back over the past 15 years, in particular, I can mark this evolution by…
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Literary Tourists
This past week, the city [of Boston] inaugurated the nation’s first “Literary District,” a bookish spin on the state’s “Cultural District” initiative, with a website consolidating information on the neighborhood’s literary cred and a calendar of events. (Those include such…
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Zadie Smith’s Room With a Manhattan View
The mad men know that we know the Soho being referenced here: the Soho of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the Soho that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen yogurt. That Soho no longer exists, of course, but it’s…
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Listing Back in Time
Turns out that the “listicle”, the undisputed yet controversial protagonist of online journalism, is way older than the Internet! As The Morning News reports, the New York Times started to publish “some facts about…”-styled features in the late 19th century.
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Women and Non-Fiction
As the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book, a biography, I have become aware of how male-dominated the field of biography is. But why all of nonfiction? That is the hard question Anne Boyd Rioux tries to answer with her…
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Writing Portraits
Using Italian author Alessandro Baricco’s recently translated novellas, Mr. Gwyn and Three Times at Dawn, as a starting point, Matt Seidel goes deep over at The Millions into the subject of portraiture in literature.
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Notable Interns
In The Physiology of the Employee (1841)—a pamphlet-length essay on the misery of bureaucracy—the French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote: “An intern is to the Civil Service what a choirboy is to the Church, or what an army child is…
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The Art of The Novel
The approach coupled with the scope (covering, as it does, a huge swath of time) results in maybe the most complete history of the novel in English ever produced. Over at The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark reviews “The Novel: a…
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Book With No Pictures
After publishing a collection of short stories earlier this year, B.J. Novak has just released his first book for children, Book With No Pictures. The title is pretty self-explanatory—as an interview with Novak in the Atlantic puts it, instead of traditional pictures,…
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Great Obituaries
How does it feel to be in charge of writing about the deaths of outstanding people? Over at the Paris Review, Margalit Fox tells us about her twenty years (and twelve hundreds obituaries) at the New York Times.
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Ask Yourself a Question and Give Yourself an Answer
Excellent. When you’re asked, “Where do you get your inspiration?” what do you wish you could say, but keep to yourself? That as a child, my parents fucked me up, and the only way to cope with that was to…
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Attention Spans Fall, Short Fiction Rises
That is not to say that normal books will decline. Of course they won’t. There will always be a place for big, satisfying stories to burrow through. But it seems that the rise of short stories are partly caused by…