Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Margaret and the No Good, Very Bad Prison
We know some of the things we desire are probably not what we should do. That’s what makes drama interesting. Anshuman Iddamsetty sat down with Margaret Atwood to talk about her new book, The Heart Goes Last, and the conversation includes…
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Whale Day, the Very Best Day
Friday was Moby-Dick’s 164th birthday, and much celebration was to be had. Lit Hub went particularly hard, sharing all manner of whale-related materials: A history of whales in literature from Jonah to Melville to Nathaniel Philbrick; 120-year-old plaster dildos in Nantucket and the…
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Baffling Perfection
The business of classics being perfect books is baloney. They are as defective, as inadequate as everything else in the universe. Careful readers see these flaws as reflections of their own frailty. Ilan Stavans, a man known for his love…
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Critique through Juxtaposition
To interrogate what causes popular things to be popular is to focus on the responses to art offered by regular people with no expertise at all, which is to be, by definition, common. Your favorite tumblog became a book and…
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In the Wind Like Singing
Over on Kill Your Darlings, Angela Meyer writes a lovely reflective essay on her time spent in Barnhill, where George Orwell stayed while he wrote 1984. She explores Orwell through the mess that might be 1984, the perfection of his…
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Ferrante in Fragments
Guernica has an excerpt from an upcoming collection of letters and interviews by Elena Ferrante, Fragments: On Writing, Reading, and Absence, featuring some beautiful prose on the origins of writing, some slant-eyed answers to questions of identity, and brutal melancholia brought…
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How to Become
Mensah Demary, Associate Web Editor for the new and exciting online literary outlet Catapult, shares his story of how he got to be where he is through a series of hilarious and depressing montages, with an overarching theme worth internalizing: “I don’t…
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Canonized Outrage
Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it? Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation…
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Folk Poets and Scrambled Eggs
I think that’s avant-garde—the meeting of need and language. Over at Lit Hub, contemporary poetic hero Ben Lerner sits down with contemporary poetic heroine Eileen Myles to talk about vernacular, supercilious labels, the trials and tribulations of a young poet after…
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The Video Game Literati
Tobias Carroll, writing for Hazlitt, dissects the influence video games have had on literature, from writers like Ernest Cline of Ready Player One to Jonathan Lethem and an entire literary anthology, Press Start to Play. We’re only waiting for Franzen to…
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The Antithesis of Context
e.v. de cleyre, writing for Ploughshares, offers a look at the art of omission from Rankine to Fitzgerald: what it means to omit something from the story, whether it be context or framework, and the implications of that omission on…
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Fifty and Bored
I’m going to eat my breakfast, then I’m going to go write up my murder report on two beefs, and then I’m going to fill out my usual nothing-happened-this-week report and send it to the state of Wyoming to be…