Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“Who the Hell Cares About Anne Sexton’s Grandmother?”
When we read a piece of fiction, we don’t assume—or at least we know we’re not supposed to assume—it’s a faithful recreation of an event in the author’s life. But what about when we read a poem? For Poetry, Kathleen Rooney writes…
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Louisiana Town Votes to Save Library
Last week, EveryLibrary reported that “Mr. Lindel Toups, chair of the Parish Council in Lafourche, LA…is orchestrating a ‘special election’ this Saturday to take money away from the library to build a new jail. Yes, literally taking money from the…
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New Edition of Philip Roth Available
Exciting publishing news from the Onion, everyone! Looks like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is releasing a new leather-bound Philip Roth! No, really. Like, the man himself is bound in leather.
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Children’s Books Still Dominated by White Boys
We’ve blogged before about the issue of representation in children’s and young-adult literature. This post by Soraya Chemaly looks at the numbers and finds that kid-lit books feature twice as many male protagonists as female ones (three times as many…
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“Ladies Be Sure Your Pants Are Buttoned”
Dangerous Minds has a splendid collection of vintage photos of drag kings from back in the day when “the simple act of walking down a public street dressed in clothing associated with the gender you were not assigned at birth…
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A Father’s Striking Photos of His Autistic Son
In the vein of Naoki Hagoshida’s The Reason I Jump (and David Mitchell’s Guardian essay), photographer Timothy Archibald created a breathtaking series of portraits of his autistic son Elijah. Archibald originally started taking the photos “so he could show them to behavioral specialists,”…
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RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel Prize–winning author Doris Lessing passed away in her London home at the age of 94. The 11th woman to ever win the Nobel, Lessing broke ground with both the form and the content of books like The Golden Notebook, Children of…
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Pioneer Women
My own mother bought our clothes at the mall. She didn’t allow pork in the house and mostly cooked curry. The saris she wore didn’t require needlework. Growing up in Wyoming, Nina McConigley longed for an authentic pioneer life like…
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“Write What You Feel Like Writing”
For the Believer, Lane Koivu interviews our fearless leader Stephen Elliott about, among other things, “the thrill of finding himself in the director’s chair, the time he nearly got locked up by a psychiatrist in San Francisco, and why he’s always in…
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Lit-Mags in Pop Culture
“Does anybody outside of our circle care?” asks The Millions’ Nick Ripatrazone in a post about literary magazines. “What is the wider cultural influence of literary magazines?” To try to figure it out, he looks at pop-culture depictions of lit-mags,…
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Malcolm X’s Diary Released
Today marks the (probable) publication of the diary that Malcolm X kept “during the last year of his life as he broke away from the Nation of Islam and traveled throughout Africa and the Middle East.” It’s coedited by one…
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26 Abortion Stories
The same woman can wake up one morning with regret, the next with relief—most have feelings too knotty for a picket sign. “There’s no room,” one woman told us, “to talk about being unsure.” Though its author is clearly pro-choice,…