Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Trapped Inside the Novel
My problem with the grand traditional novel—or rather traditional narrative in general, short stories included—is the vision of character, the constant reinforcement of a fictional selfhood that accumulates meaning through suffering and the overcoming of suffering. At once a palace…
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Seamus Heaney’s Last Poem
Seamus Heaney’s poem “In A Field” is allegedly the last poem ever written by Seamus Heaney before his passing in June. The Irish Poet wrote it following an invitation by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy to contribute to a memorial anthology about…
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T.S. Eliot’s Long-Lost Lecture
In a letter of May 21, 1924, an English literary critic invited T.S. Eliot to speak to the club on “any subject connected with the Elizabethan drama.” As late as November 6, Eliot told Richard Aldington that the lecture was…
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Old-Fashioned Correspondence
I started trawling through books, visiting local museums and exhibitions and navigating various online archives, looking for examples of interesting correspondence, and, within a few days, I’d found so many fascinating documents – letters, memos, telegrams – that I was…
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Long Forgotten Books
In 1934, Malcolm Cowley, editor of The New Republic, got in touch with many renowned American writers asking them to list 3 or 4 of the best hidden gems of literature adding a few sentences to present the titles to…
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Mr. Bad News Who?
It can be a harrowing experience, Whitman knows, requiring that the writer become an instant historian, assessing in a few hours the dead man’s life with lucidity, accuracy, and objectivity. Gay Talese believes “Mr. Bad News” is one of the…
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Fiction or Non fiction: That is the question
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction? Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar. Mishra answers, “Even writers working within the old verities of stability and coherence — we…
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Fairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
In the 1920s, while living in Paris, poet E. E. Cummings wrote fairy tales for his only little daughter Nancy, which was an unknown fact until 1965. Only four survived and published in a small booklet accompanied by drawing by Canadian artist…
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World Wide Poetry
Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more…
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JHUMPA LAHIRI’S LOWLAND
The final key moment was when, suddenly, I was able to write the novel without feeling as though I needed the crutch of all the research and all of the books, and I felt that the characters were strong enough…
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Zadie Smith Remembers Her Father
There is a sentimental season, early on in the process of mourning, in which you believe that everything you happen to be doing or seeing or eating, the departed person would also have loved to do or see or eat,…
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AT THE (HORROR) MOVIES
When I watch Psycho, for instance, the shock of Janet Leigh’s character being murdered is lost on me because all I can think about is what I’d be doing if I were in that shower stall, to wit: Grabbing the…