Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Common Strange
Ena Brdjanovic describes the commanding, performative, discomfiting, and off-kilter folk tale qualities of Diane Williams’s recent story collection: In sum, the 40 short stories of Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine amount to a collage of beautifully trimmed and perplexing details,…
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One of the Crowd
12,000 members of the literary community/industry gathered in LA for AWP last week. Viet Thanh Nguyen considers the writer’s sometimes conflicting needs for audience, privacy, and the tribe. He writes of his own process preparing for a readership, “The constant reworking…
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Poets Unrestrained
Over at Harriet, Uche Nduke writes full-throttle praise and rich description of three poets who influenced him, Norman Fischer, Andrew Levy, and Lewis Warsh. Nduke’s own writing is anchored by political conscience, but unintimidated by the conventional.
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Women Writers Lost and Found
Henry James found in the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” There’s a roll call of…
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The Novel as a Character
At Lit Hub, an excerpt from a vivid, metaphor-rich conversation that appears in the spring issue of BOMB Magazine in which Christopher Sorrentino calls the novel an “impoverished count, living in a ransacked villa, dressing for dinner every day,” while Dana…
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Eileen Myles Is a “Hall of Mirrors”
Famous people are of course the repositories for the hopes, dreams, and shames of the non famous. Arielle Greenberg, editor of Rumpus series (K)ink: Writing While Deviant, writes searchingly about herself, Eileen Myles, poetry, and fame for the Poetry Foundation.
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Writing from the Margins into the Universal
Sahota takes it further in “The Year of the Runaways”: “What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.” With an eye on…
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Self-in-Landscape Art
It’s Women’s History Month at the Poetry Foundation. The editors peg Elizabeth Bishop’s poems—in volumes with titles like North & South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—to her wide-ranging geography, and to her illustrious cohort.
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Author in the First Person
There’s humor and advice on the long haul of novel-writing in an interview with Porochista Khakpour over at Prairie Schooner. Khakpour describes “problem-solving a chunk at a time,” and pushing through a “stalling chapter” to get from drafting to publishing.
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Human Nature
Han Kang, Korean author of the recently translated The Vegetarian, takes on humanity “from the sublime to the brutal.” In an in-depth interview at The White Review, she explores the “(im)possibility of innocence,” and the “gestures of refusal,” that run through…
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Reading on Reading on Reading
Reading Montaigne, the god of the sinuous modern essay, the essay that invites the reader to watch the writer write, is “reading him reading,” and reading others reading him before. At Lit Hub, Hannah Brooks-Motl describes how reading stimulates the self-consciousness…
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Children in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”