Posts by author
Katie O’Brien
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Exclamation Points Are Feminist!
Friendly emails are a sign of progress, not weakness, in our working lives. Policing women’s use of language is over (we wish). But at the Huffington Post, Angelina Chapin argues that women’s use of exclamation marks in the workplace represents…
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The Editing of Anne Frank’s Diary Was Sexist
There’s something very unsettling about the idea of editing someone’s personal and autobiographical journal. After all, it’s supposed to be a portal into the past: Anne’s experience in the annex, exactly what happened exactly as it happened. At The Establishment,…
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A “Girl” and Her Mother
At The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also…
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Lois Lowry on Lord of the Flies
Lois Lowry takes to the New York Times with her story of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at age sixteen, and how her perspective on its portrayal of children and violence has (and hasn’t) changed in…
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The Words We Use to Describe Life Stories
To an English-speaker, the difference between “autobiography” and “memoir” seems intuitive. But in German, there’s no equivalent of the word “memoir.” At Lit Hub, Tara Bray Smith muses on the distinction between the two genres, and what it tells us…
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Trump + Books = ???
At Electric Literature, Dani Spencer looks at Japanese writers who have already written dozens of books that envision what the world could look like if Donald Trump were to win the election. Let’s hope that’s the closest we have to…
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The Swiping Game
Over at Lit Hub, Bridget Read discusses the gender politics of Tinder, the rise of the Single Woman, and how these phenomena have permeated recent nonfiction by women: It makes sense that independence would be their chosen frontier, the pursuit…
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And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…
Bob Dylan? At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel acknowledged that no one is quite sure how to feel about the news. At Slate, Stephen Metcalf praises Bob Dylan’s genius, but argues that he’s a musician, not a poet: The objection here…
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What Elena Ferrante and Kim Kardashian Have in Common
While the outing of Elena Ferrante and the robbing of Kim Kardashian were not inherently gendered acts, the responses to them certainly have been. In light of these two seemingly divergent issues, the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino meditates on the framing…
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Translating the War in Syria
At Lit Hub, Lina Mounzer discusses the Syrian women bearing witness to the war through writing, her own complicated relationship with the English language, and translation as a symbolic act: [War] reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language.…
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Zoë Ruiz in Conversation with Micah Perks
Don’t miss this interview at The Believer between former Rumpus Managing Editor Zoë Ruiz and contributor Micah Perks on Perks’s new novel, What Becomes Us—a story told from the point of view of twin fetuses inside the main character. Topics discussed include the book’s themes of “nice girls,” hunger, and the desire…
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The Handmaid’s (Cautionary) Tale
At The Establishment, Laura Beans discusses the importance of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a predictive novel, drawing many connections between the novel and increasing attempts to control women’s bodies: Instead of seeming further from the truth, the novel’s…