Posts by author

Guia Cortassa

  • Three Flashes of God

    The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this. For its final Flash Friday column, curated by Tin House, the Guardian shares three new excerpts from Joy Williams’s most recent collection, 99 Stories of God.

  • Pressing Send

    A writer friend recently asked me a brief but not-so-simple question: How do you decide where to send your work? Over at Lit Hub, Erika Dreifus answers this simple yet crucial question with some useful advice.

  • A Multilingual Writing Self

    At the Ploughshares blog, Bruna Dantas Lobato shares how learning a new language inspired her writing, and describes the constant, bilingual research required to find the right words: If writing in a second language is like hunting, I’m both a stalker and…

  • To Be or Not to Be (a Father)?

    We finally had The Discussion after watching a documentary about Robert McNamara, who, like all Secretaries of State before and after, failed to see the wisdom in preparing for the fall. There were three issues: what I wanted, what she…

  • How Yellow Is Yellow Enough?

    At the Paris Review, Monica Youn discusses her latest “Twinkie” poem, “Goldacre,” written after last year’s Best American Poetry controversy: It was around the same time that I first heard the insult “Twinkie”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside—a label I…

  • Three Ventures, One Goal

    Over at Publishing Perspectives, Andy Hunter, Publisher & COO of Catapult, Publisher of Literary Hub, and Co-Founding Chairman of Electric Literature, explains the different approaches but shared mission of his three ventures: There’s a common mission between them: to bring…

  • Labor of Love

    Writing as art can be what economists call a “non-market” activity. The time we spend writing poems or novels, like the time we spend doing laundry, is usually time not spent earning a dollar, even if we hope to see…

  • A Toast to a Better Life

    Now, if you’re thinking, “a toaster is not a good enough reason to continuing living such a futile existence,” then you’ve never experienced the way a piece of golden brown, bread, gently rising from an evenly-heated, cooking chamber, can lift…

  • Turkish Delight

    TI say we are not together. I say that we are not together, but I see him everywhere. He spent a summer here, summers and summers ago, and I booked my ticket to get closer to him and I booked…

  • Internet Content Creators Wanted

    Have you ever dreamed of being a “writer”? Of course, you have! Doctors don’t make as much as they used to and we no longer go into space! What choice do you have? Besides, math was never really your thing.…

  • Sleeping with Monsters

    Late the next night a noise roused me from my sleep—wailing and cursing and then banging, more banging than ever, both fists full-force against the plaster. Filtered through the sleep haze, I couldn’t make sense of the commotion. Rion Amilcar…

  • A Language Only We Can Hear

    Kendrick Lamar’s debut album “Good Kid, M.A.D.D. City” contains the basic, essential elements of a novel: a protagonist faced with an antagonistic outer world, plot and its arc—from opening scene to crisis to climax on down to denouement, a narrative…