Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Beyond A Year of Women Writers
Recently, we blogged about Lilit Marcus’s project to read only books by women for a year. That year taught her a lot, but there was one hitch: at the end, she realized that “of the 40 books I read this…
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Grimm Fairy Tales Just Got Grimmer
British art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights a recently reissued collection…
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Lil Wayne: Ecofeminist
Back in college, Chelsey Clammer proclaimed herself an ecofeminist with an outbreak of bumper stickers on the back of her car: “Tree Hugging Dirt Worshiper,” “‘The Only Bush I Trust is My Own (and underneath that I wrote ‘and my…
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Japanese-American Zoot-Suiters Subverted Pretty Much Everything
Conflicts between “rowdies” and other prisoners interrupted the daily routines of several, if not all, the camps. At the Gila River camp in Arizona, for instance, the editors of the center’s newspaper complained that zoot suiters had swiped all the…
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Animals as Rorschach Tests
We’re psyched to see that our Comics Symposium interview with Connie Sun was linked by NPR’s Robert Krulwich. Krulwich highlighted Sun’s comics about animals and our relationships with them. Check it out: “The Right Way to Hug a Lion.”
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Pussy Riot Members Freed from Prison and Pussy Riot
Here’s some news out of Russia that isn’t related the Olympics: Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, who were recently released from prison, are no longer members of Pussy Riot, and it doesn’t look like the split was 100 percent amicable.
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Addiction, Alcohol, and Authors
You didn’t ask directly about gender, but I’ll answer anyway: I stuck with men for a more personal reason, which is that my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and the subject was just too painful for…
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Barrelhouse Turns 10, Publishes Books
Ten years marks the “tin anniversary,” but lit-mag Barrelhouse is celebrating theirs in a different way: by starting a small press! Two of Barrelhouse’s first titles are You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored, a poetry collection by Justin Marks,…
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Hearing Mandarin, Speaking English
In middle school, “Yo Mama” jokes infuriated me. My mother was so Chinese she couldn’t eat a hamburger without pinching her nose. She was so Chinese she wore bamboo slippers. In a stunning essay for the Michigan Daily, Carlina Duan writes…
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A “Ridiculous, Potent Musical Minefield”
As part of McSweeney’s long-running series “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond,” Summer Brennan wrote “An Open Letter to the Mix Tape Made for Me by My College Boyfriend, Now Deceased.” It’s exactly as poignant…
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A Year of Women Writers
Although plenty of critics and academics have done a wonderful job reinterpreting what it means to be “the canon,” there are still many readers in the US who, consciously or subconsciously, believe that men have contributed most of what we…
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The Grimmest Adjuncting Story Yet
D. Watkins is an adjunct professor. He doesn’t make much money, but most of his family and friends are even worse off, struggling with wrongful convictions, the impossibly high cost of health care, and the loss of loved ones to drugs…