Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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.…