Posts by author
Jake Slovis
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Extremely Sentimental and Incredibly Useful
At Electric Literature, Manuel Betancourt argues that there is value to the “cheap sentimentality” in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and its film adaptation: What cheap sentimentality can do is to short-circuit our connection to the depths of our emotions,…
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Novelists Versus Machines
The Atlantic explains how Kurt Vonnegut’s lectures about story arcs influenced a group of researches to classify works of fiction based on six “core narratives” in order to find the “emotional trajectory of a story.” The research group hopes the data helps…
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The Desire for Distraction
For The Millions, Mike Broida revisits David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, arguing that the work’s claims about addiction and the media presaged the influence of “television culture” on the digital age: The final “joke” of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to…
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Literary Cage Match
At The Millions, Jonathan Gottschall compares his experience learning to cage fight with the struggles of being a writer, as “the writing game, like the fighting game, mostly ends in breakage”: Literary history is a history of victors. So stories about the struggles…
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Stop Demonizing Fearless Women
At Electric Literature, Bronwyn Averett interviews Julia Franks about her debut novel, Over the Plain Houses. The novel is set in a small town Appalachian Village, and explores “the government’s role in the lives of individuals, the responsibility of humans toward the environment, and…
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Admit It! You’re A Writer
For The Millions, Marcia DeSanctis shares how she learned to become a “second-career writer” after resisting her literary ambitions while working as a television news producer: A stifled artist was scratching through all of my work identities, and though my jobs…
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Writing to Legitimize the Self
To research her book Without You, There Is No Us, Suki Kim worked undercover as an ESL teacher in North Korea. Kim was reluctant to call the work a memoir, believing that to do so “trivialized” her investigative reporting. The result was a backlash…
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Love at First Book
For the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that users who share reading interests on a new dating app improve their chances of finding a good match: I’m not sure about the sexy transformation, but I do know that whether it’s with a…
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The Vulnerability of Outsiders
Carmen Maria Machado reflects on her experience reading Lois Duncan’s novels in her youth, and explains why she continues to return to Duncan’s work to this day: Duncan has sometimes been grouped with writers like Christopher Pike or R. L. Stine,…
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The Perfect Prism: Muhammad Ali and Literature
For the New York Times, Richard Sandomir investigates how Muhammad Ali influenced literature, as his life story functions as “the perfect prism through which to view sports, race, religion, politics, celebrity, comedy, tragedy.”
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Reading for a Paycheck
At Electric Literature, Nick Politan reports on a new study that suggests that reading in childhood has a link to financial success in adulthood. Politan, however, is critical of the study, which he argues reduces books to their “capitalist value”:…
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Describing the Indescribable
Electric Literature asked four writers to sit down and discuss Lian Hearn’s epic series The Tale of Shikanoko, a work of “historical fantasy” that “defies all easy description or easy understanding.” Here’s what author Kelly Luce had to say about the work: The world…