Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Chris Kraus + Jill Soloway
Chris Kraus’s experimental, cult classic I Love Dick has been adapted for TV by Jill Soloway, and it’s time to revisit and scrutinize Kraus’s use of the slur “kike,” and indeed Kraus’s sense of her own Jewishness. In the Los…
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Eliot to the Internet
Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other…
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Readers’ Work
Vivid, shiver-inducing, short story excerpts stud “The Summer People of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link” over at Longreads. On conjuring a story with the same title as Jackson’s original, iconic, and creepy “The Summer People,” Kelly Link says, “I liked…
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City Nature
When I look at the skyline of Manhattan, I get a feeling similar to when I look at the Rocky Mountains. People living in urban environments can have a relationship with the natural world, and in my writing I like…
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Raw Material
Our VW van had a Porsche engine, other modifications that made it good for tough Mexican roads. Gorgeous photographs accompany Lucia Berlin’s own account, with an introduction by Cressida Leyshon, of her travels in Mexico, drugs, and family life. Memories…
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The Work Doesn’t Forget
Anthony Walton remembers poet, editor, and Brown University professor Michael Harper as a “secular priest”—of words and deeds and heart: For Michael, poetry was like psychoanalysis: a searching out and recovery of narratives, not just his own, but national and…
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#RumiWasntWhite
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, screenwriter Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn makes a strong and timely case for Hollywood to quit casting big-name white actors no matter the role. Particularly egregious, and absurd, is the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio as the…
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Girlhood Comes Home to Roost
I think I always knew this story about the rural road where I grew up needed to be told. At the Believer, Annie DeWitt talks to Brandon Hobson about realism, ambiguity, and how her own childhood folds into her new…
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Tome of Black Womanhood
One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display.…
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Literary Layers
In her review of Cynthia Ozick’s new essay collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, Zoe Heller quotes Ozick quoting Lionel Trilling in reference to Jonathan Franzen’s commercial-literary ambition: “a writer must ‘direct his words to his spiritual ancestors,…
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On Publishers Big and Small
At the Atlantic, Nathan Scott McNamara provides an optimistic view of the symbiotic relationship between massive corporate publishers and small indie houses. Profiling energetic presses like Graywolf, Coffee House, Two Dollar Radio, and Dorothy, McNamara argues: …by inventing new models rather than…
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Beware of Dog
At the Poetry Foundation, Sara Ivry interviews a host of poets on the occasion of Cave Canem’s twentieth anniversary. Robin Coste Lewis points to the brilliance of founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in situating Cave Canem above the fray: We’re…