Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Wish List for More
Alice Gregory and Thomas Mallon request sequels in the New York Times Bookends column. After sifting through some recent, popular marriage novels like Fates and Furies and Gone Girl, Gregory declares her allegiance to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and…
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An Interview Goes Both Ways
An unorthodox conversation, or experimental, two-way interview between Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey at BOMB yields miscommunication, communication, repetition, randomness, push, pull, aphorism, and wisdom. On reading contemporary literature, Ball says: There’s something pernicious about work that is from your specific…
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Baby as Muse
Lucy Ives writes about Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors for the Los Angeles Review of Books: It’s a study of a baby and of babies, of culture and of vulnerability. Most of all, it’s a study of everything one has missed…
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A Poet’s Prose
…while poems often proceed by way of large imaginative leaps, I found that prose urged me to stay put longer and extrapolate more. At Guernica, Christopher Kondrich and Tracy K. Smith talk about differences between poetry and prose, and writing…
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Moore for the Digital Age
There’s a way in which poets are always ahead of their time, if they’re good enough to be universal. At The Poetry Foundation, Alexandra Pechman describes how Marianne Moore’s poetry was always in play, never finished or frozen: “Her habits…
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C.E. Morgan’s Three Rs: Readers, Regionalism, and Race
“There is an extraordinary freedom to make your own intellectual choices that’s part of the reading process,” says C.E. Morgan, of her readers and her own reading process, in conversation with Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation. Lucas has…
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Singing a Story
Certainly some of my favorite songs are the ones that, weeks later, or months later, or sometimes even years later, you get hit by a lyric that you suddenly understand in a way you didn’t. Writer-musician Ben Arthur and musician…
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The Zen of Twins
Clay Byars—author of Will & I, his recently released memoir about being an identical twin—tackles big life questions and the writing process with Drew Broussard for FSG Originals. Edited by Byars’s friend John Jeremiah Sullivan, Will & I explores “the sense that I…
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Art as Moral Privilege
For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral responsibility of art. She posits that “there is a way in…
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Tour of Today
We follow Heffernan through the Smithsonian Natural Museum of Internet History, as she annotates the exhibits: the Kindle, with its lithe design and endless supply of books, usurper of the printed word; the MP3, compressing the rapture and idiosyncrasies of…
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Cosmically Illegal
At the Kenyon Review blog, Brian Michael Murphy celebrates the sheer density of reference and intricate structuring of rap lyrics revealed by a computer program, The Raplyzer, and its Rhyme Factor Scale. Murphy dissects the lyric genius of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah…