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Between The Covers
Looking for a good new podcast? Check out Between The Covers! Hosted by David Naimon, it’s a literary radio broadcast/podcast for KBOO 90.7 FM in Portland, Oregon. The latest episode features our own Essays Editor Roxane Gay talking about trigger warnings, her new book, and television. Previous episodes have featured Sunday Editor Gina Frangello, contributor…
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Hands In Bleach
A classic Annie Dilliard-ism; “The way you spend your days/is the way you spend your life.” In the latest Oxford American, Southern poet Rebecca Gayle Howard—guest editor of the OA summer issue—talks about her writing process and how she spends her days: For me the writing life is much like any trade work: one part apprenticeship and…
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No Time To Be Neurotic
The Believer has just published what is likely writer Peter Matthiessen’s last interview, conducted only a month before his death. Included: Jaws, the sticker that Kurt Vonnegut left on Matthiessen’s car, and why Matthiessen didn’t like to write about New York: I also very rarely write about cities or urban people—especially urban people of our own region. ’Cause…
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Lost Words For A Spruce Tree
Over at The Hairpin, Isabelle Fraser interviews Ann Wroe, obituary writer for The Economist. Wroe has written obituaries for J.D. Salinger, Aaron Swartz, and the 25-year old carp that was “England’s best-loved fish”. On Marie Smith, the last person to speak Eyak, an Alaskan language, she relates: “She was the only person left who remembered all the different…
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To the Bar!
We’ve all gotten texts like these, though perhaps not from these particular writers… Jessie Gaynor’s “More Drunk Texts from Famous Authors,” over at the Paris Review, features the fictitious (and very buzzed) Roald Dahl, T.S Eliot, and William Blake, among others.
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An Evolutionary Love Story
One of Karen Russell’s favorite myths is the tale of Apollo and Daphne. Read about how it inspired her short story “The Bad Graft” and how she feels about the Joshua tree, here. Without boring everybody further, I was thrilled to learn about the ancient evolutionary love story between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth,…
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It Has To Do With Attention
Q: What is the difference between a poem and a cloud? A: Not very much, according to the poet Mary Ruefle in this (delightful) interview, found in Music & Literature: The clouds are written to us, as we are the only ones to receive them, we the living. And what are poems but weather reports? Is there a difference…
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VIDA Launches Roundtable Discussion Series
VIDA is launching a new roundtable discussion series on issues in writing by women on June 2nd at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The event is the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This time, they conversation centers on how women write about other women, featuring a panel including Jill Lepore, Rebecca…
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Lightning and Lawn Debris
No spoilers here, but Patricia Lockwood’s new poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is garnering significant praise. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes that: Patricia Lockwood’s sexy, surreal and mostly sublime poems seem to have been, as James Joyce said in “Ulysses” about a batch of folk tales, “printed by the weird sisters in the year…
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WWNBD: What Would Nellie Bly Do?
Two things: First, Alice Gregory’s fascinating account of Nellie Bly’s bold, perennially wry career in journalism—an account that wraps up with a call for female writers to not only write about “women’s issues.” Second, Ann Friedman responds with a thoughtful defense of making a career writing about “women’s issues.”
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“How do we access what we cannot know?”
A book of poetry wrangling with your complicated Southern genealogy: this, by definition, is a complicated endeavor. The Forage House, Tess Taylor’s debut book of poetry, finds the author doing just that. The Oxford American talks to her about what that was like: A lot of these poems are a kind of anti-reporting. They’re a record of the places where…
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East Egg, West Egg, Deviled Egg
Besotted by over-saturated news feeds, sometimes, you may just want to read vignettes about the more precocious members of the egg family; for this, we have Sadie Stein. Three Stories about Deviled Eggs, over at the Paris Review: Life had changed; suddenly deviled eggs were everywhere—at tapas bars, in sepia-toned Brooklyn whiskey joints. I, too, was jaded;…