Posts by author
Jake Slovis
193 posts
Jake Slovis is a writer and educator. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses focused on visual narrative and composition. His work has appeared in The Millions, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Stability in the Spinning Chaos
Why is Catch-22 so widely read? According to the Guardian’s Sam Jordison, Joseph Heller’s novel is powerful because its protagonist Yossarian is “an old-fashioned hero”: Readers immediately cared about Yossarian, and his survival.…
Ragtime and the Mysterious Teenage Highlighter
At The Millions, Jacob Lambert shares a letter written to an unknown teenager who annotated and “ruined” his secondhand copy of Ragtime. Lambert expresses bewilderment over the passages that the teenager highlighted,…
What Not to Wear
For The Millions, Rosa Lyster analyzes the “dos and don’ts” of writing about clothes, arguing that strong descriptions of clothing can help enliven a narrative and provide clues about a character’s…
Imagining A Dystopian Olympic Games
At the Huffington Post, Maddie Crum and Maxwell Strachan ask 7 science fiction authors to hypothesize about what a dystopian Olympics might look like. While most of the authors acknowledge the…
Private Belief vs. Public Art
For The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone explores Eyewear Publishing’s new anthology, The Poet’s Quest for God, and explains why poets “need God”: How do we discern a writer’s religious beliefs? When does the…
Down, Out, and “Paved With Anguish”
At the Guardian, Tim Cooke investigates why writers’ experiences with homelessness and destitution fascinates readers: So what is the attraction of being down and out? For some, the prospect of real,…
A Brief Relationship with Writing
At The Millions, Bryan VanDyke reflects on his experience writing several unpublished novels, and how these manuscripts helped motivate him to write the draft of his first published work in less…
Learning to Feel Sorry
For Electric Literature, Adam Vitcavage interviews Swan Huntley about how Huntley’s experience working as a nanny helped her to conceive her debut novel We Could Be Beautiful: What interested me so much about…
How to Write Wilderness
At The Millions, Mary Catherine Martin responds to the flaws she found in Dave Eggers’s representation of the Alaskan wilderness in his most recent novel, Heroes of the Frontier. She explains…
Book Covers: A Symptom of Sexism
For Lit Hub, book designer Jennifer Heuer reflects on sexism in publishing and analyzes “chick-lit” book covers that rely on gender stereotypes to target female readers: The bigger discussion is…
Computer Programs Make Good Writing Buddies
For The Millions, Philip Hopkins shares what he learned after attempting to co-author a book with a computer program. Through the experience, Hopkins ultimately concludes that “the gap between simple self-awareness…