Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Small Presses, Big Impact
The silver lining of the publishing industry’s turmoil is that independent small presses are increasingly able to bring readers unique and fascinating books. Flavorwire’s Jason Diamond has collected twenty-five of the presses doing the risky but essential work bigger publishers…
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Feminist Victories You Haven’t Heard About
In a nation as solipsistic as the US, we don’t hear much about politics in other countries. This is doubly true when it comes to woman-centered movements, and triply true when those movements are in Africa. In an opinion piece…
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Beyond Good Writing
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the…
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The Other Bay Area
Chris was also a transfer student but from the other direction, further north, one of the towns in that cluster—El Sobrante, Crockett, Port Costa—where the Bay waters tentacle and the urbanity dissipates. “The Midwest begins where the BART line ends,”…
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The Most Terrifying Art Project in the World
Here’s a totally normal thing that exists: a lake with a pH so far to the base end of the scale that when birds crash-land in it, they not only die but also calcify. Of course, like any everyday person…
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Put A Strange Object in Your Earholes
Did you like the super hot prof-on-student word sex between Steve Almond and Kelly Luce from a few days ago? Then you might also enjoy words from Callie Collins and Jill Meyers, the cofounders of the press that published Luce’s…
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Breaking Down Sentences and Style via Gordon Lish
If you think of Gordon Lish, now best known for editing Raymond Carver’s work, as an “eccentric editor; tyrannical teacher; notorious provocateur,” you may need to take a second look. In a roundtable for the Center for Fiction’s Literarian, David Winters, Greg…
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #1: “Henry Lee”
Now that Nick Cave Mondays have drawn to a close, the obvious next step is PJ Harvey Tuesdays.
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Getting Out of the Slush Pile
Want to get out of the slush pile and onto the pages of your favorite publications? Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn has some seriously wise words for you over at her Daily Dot column. One of the wisest bits comes from…
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“I Am One of Them”
Crossing Over, a documentary by director Isabel Castro, follows three transgender women—all of them undocumented Mexican immigrants—as they seek asylum in the US. “Although this started as a project to raise awareness about the complexities of immigration,” Castro told Buzzfeed,…
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Literary Geniuses Say Some Not-So-Genius Things
In “honor” of David Gilmour’s comments to a Hazlitt interviewer about how he refused to teach books by female authors, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean rounded up some other literary men’s contributions to the field of misogyny. From Hemingway blaming all men’s…
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TV Can Be Literature Too
Long-running, writer-driven shows have overtaken American cinema as the most prestigious strand of American visual culture, revealing most of even the supposedly best American movies as risk-averse, unimaginative, and hopelessly bound by their time constraints. Todd Hasak-Lowy argues on the Believer‘s blog…