Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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David the Lion
What sets Bazan apart from artists like Sufjan Stevens and Death Cab for Cutie is his willingness to get a little darker and more intimate while evoking the pathetic ironies that come from the most poetic Elvis Costello lines and…
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Album of the Week: Christine Ott’s Tabu
After many years of touring it as a ciné-concert performance, Christine Ott finally found a home for her Tabu, releasing it on Gizeh Records for its Dark Peak Series. In it, the French musician, who worked with Yann Tiersen and…
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Album of the Week: Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love!
Amidst writing, producing, and starring in the FX series Atlanta and being cast to portray a young Lando Calrissian in an upcoming Star Wars installment, Donald Glover took some time to return to his Childish Gambino persona and has released one of the…
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Album of the Week: Jay Daniel’s Broken Knowz
When it comes to musical legacies, Detroit’s is singular: talking about “Detroit sound” can refer to a jump into Motown’s soul vibes or a dive into the roots of techno’s hammering basses, two apparently distant and antipodal hearts that have…
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Album of the Week: Alex Izenberg’s Harlequin
If you were asked to name a Los Angeles solo musician who published his notable, kaleidoscopic debut album—made of orchestral arrangements, train noises, great melodies, and experimental cut-ups—in his mid twenties, after years and years of writing, chances are high…
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Dancing about Writing
At the Guardian, Zadie Smith writes about why dance is important for her and for her writing: The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it’s a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected—compared…
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Fading into Mystery
For Atlas Obscura, Abby Norman retraces Barbara Newhall Follett’s mysterious history: She is called a child prodigy, a literary luminary, a spirit of nature. So why have so few people heard of her or read her work? For one, Barbara…
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Clothes Do Not Make the Man
On our way home, Lauren told me she talked to another woman at the Halloween party who went on and on about wishing to be a man for a day. The other woman just wanted to know what it felt…
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Let’s Get Scary
Over at the Quietus, horror master Adam Nevill revealed his favorite short stories from contemporary writers working in the field of modern horror to Sean Kitching.
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Literature Tricks or Political Threats?
So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief…
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Running with Ears
Derek Teslik tackles the importance of running for an author—and listening to Joyce audiobooks while doing so—in an essay over at The Millions: So, for this last run, I wanted to up the mental game somehow, maybe simulate the brutality of…
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Scrabbling Love
While I was in residential treatment, my Scrabble games with my mom slowed down. We both lingered over our turns, taking longer than usual to make the next move. Normally I rush to play my turn, keeping the tab open…