Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“I Might Really Geek Out Here, Dude”
In 2005, Elizabeth Gilbert was a mid-list author with some fiction and some journalism under her belt. In 2006, she tried something new and published a memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. The rest is history and Oprah Book Club sales. Now she’s returned…
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The Weirdest Costumes You’ve Ever Seen
Switzerland: country of chocolate, chalets, and…a traditional costume of a freaky, faceless rope man, with bells attached in random places? French photographer Charles Fréger traveled Europe, taking pictures of the costumes used in centuries-old pagan rituals that still survive in…
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Country Music’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriends
Why is it that despite country music’s overall conservatism and exaltation of rural, small-town culture, female country artists routinely write songs that would make a simple country farmer’s eyes bug out? Why do the men sing about inoffensive, patriotic good…
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The 2013 Great Write Off Is Here!
Today marks the first day of this year’s Great Write Off, an annual literary fundraiser in Michigan. Much like walk-a-thon-style fundraisers, the Great Write Off asks people to sponsor teams of writers and pledge money for each page they write.…
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Forget Shark Week, It’s Goat Week!
Back in January, we blogged about a call for submissions at Modern Farmer, “a print quarterly and website devoted to the people, policy, animals, plants, and technology around farming and food.” The site has really come into its own by declaring…
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Existence of Typewriter Confuses and Angers Internet
Shortly after moving to New York, writer C. D. Hermelin decided to try a cool busking experiment: he’d sit out in parks with an old typewriter and compose on-the-fly stories for passersby, asking them to donate what they could. It…
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Invisible Man Gets A Little More Invisible
The Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia reports that Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has been banned from school libraries and reading lists in Randolph County, North Carolina. After a parent decried the book as “not so innocent,” the school board voted 5–2…
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Secret Paintings Magically Appear in Old Books
If you haven’t yet seen these secret fore-edge paintings—paintings that appear on the side of the book opposite the spine when you squish the pages into a slanted line—they’re well worth a look. Both Flavorwire and io9 have posts with…
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Real-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde totally hooked up. Maybe. Probably.…
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This Novel Takes New-Media Writing to the Next Level
Danger lies in the insertion of any technology in fiction, whether it is misunderstood, clumsily included, or over-relied upon. It dates a work, but it also helps indicate how well a novel lives in that date: whether something has been captured, or…
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How Racism Hurts White Writers
The fight against inequality, the fight against The Default, is a fight for white spiritual and emotional freedom, not just the freedom of people of color, women, or gays and lesbians. In a diffuse but thought-provoking essay at Salon, Kartina Richardson…
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The Cutest Librarian
If you ask Kuzya, an assistant librarian at the State Hermitage Library in Novorossiysk, Russia, for a book recommendation, you might go home with A Tale of Two Kitties or The Brothers Kara-meow-zov. Because he is a cat. And he wears a bow-tie…