Posts by author
Kelly Lynn Thomas
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White Jealousy
The new Best American Poetry anthology, edited by Sherman Alexie, contains a poem by the very white Michael Derrick Hudson who used the pen-name Yi-Fen Chou to get his poem into publication. Now, Asian American poets are pushing to get readers…
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A Look Back at Amazon’s Twenty Years
Publisher’s Weekly has a retrospective on Amazon.com’s 20 years of selling books, DVDs, electronics, and everything else. The article cites the introduction of the Kindle and the Kindle e-bookstore as Amazon’s most important innovation, but is quick to cite the company’s…
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Complicating The New Jim Crow
At the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh discusses a new provocative book about current racial tensions in the US. The book, Black Silent Majority by Michael Javen Fortner, aims to complicate the idea that black people are disproportionately affected by police violence and…
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Awkward Feminist
The Guardian’s Anna Schachner has a run-down of the awkwardness that ensued between Roxane Gay and Erica Jong at the keynote address of the Decatur Book Festival on September 4th. While some audience members clapped, others shifted uncomfortably at the…
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Silent Reading… or Not
But do we actually scan the written word silently? Recent neurological research questions whether silent reading actually is silent. Evidence grows that the brain interprets “silent” reading as an auditory phenomenon. Our ancestors most likely read aloud, in public, rather…
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N.K. Jemison on Experimental Fantasy
Over at Electric Literature, Tobias Carroll interviews fantasy author N.K. Jemison about her character- and world-building processes, the evolution of her publication history, and narrative structure. I read pretty widely, not just fantasy, so I don’t feel particularly wedded to…
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The Guardian Asks for Help
After the Guardian released a list of the 100 best books written in English, readers and writers railed against it for being too male and too white. The newspaper is listening to its readers and asking for more diverse suggestions to…
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On Being Both an Editor and Writer
At Lit Hub, editor and author Jill Bialosky examines the ways in which writing and editing work themselves out in her mind. She writes in the early morning, before tackling anything else, and then goes to work critiquing the work of other…
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Reading Deemed Criminal for Chelsea Manning
The Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations, as investigated by The Atlantic, state their right to prohibit any publications found “to be detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution or if it might facilitate criminal activity.” Chelsea…
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The Rumpus Interview with Aliza Licht
Aliza Licht, former SVP of Communications for Donna Karan International, talks about her debut career guide, what she wishes she knew when she was starting out, and how to build an audience on Twitter.
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Writing Through History
Ottessa Moshfegh views the past as a sort of fiction—she didn’t live it, so in a way, it is fiction to her. This view informs both her novels, which are full of deeply flawed characters and rich details. But writing…
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Joan Didion: Conservative to Liberal
How exactly did Joan Didion go from writing for conservative weekly the National Review to serving as a leading voice for the left? The New Yorker offers an answer: What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn…