Junot Díaz Pairs Up with Jaime Hernandez, Heaven and Nature Rejoice
This Is How You Lose Her, the latest collection of short stories from spectacular writer and all-around good human being Junot Díaz, will be reissued in a deluxe edition in…
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Lauren O'Neal
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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.
McSweeney’s Night of One Hundred Apocalypses
Quick! Think of some apocalypses! How many did you think of? For Lucy Corin, the answer is one hundred, and some others. That’s why she named her book One Hundred Apocalypses…
Even More Barriers to Women Writers’ Success
It’s not just the frighteningly misogynistic diatribes in the comments section—several other forces conspire to make life harder for female writers and journalists. For example: “The most successful branded journalists…
Namibian Fashion Spools Out a Whole World of Meaning
To many Americans, fashion is a frivolous distraction. To many women in Namibia, it’s an expression of identity hammered out of years of tradition, culture, colonialism, and genocide. Catherine E.…
“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who…
After 1984, There Was 1983
Think of the year 1984 and your mind can’t help but jump to great books, thanks to George Orwell’s dystopic classic. But what about 1983? To put some sparkle back…
Master of Feeling Ambivalent
There are a lot of people who have very strong feelings about MFA programs, but Blake Butler’s Vice piece “What I Remember from Getting an MFA in Creative Writing,” just sort…
August Kleinzahler and Alec Soth in SF
Bay Area readers won’t want to miss this City Arts event with poet/essayist August Kleinzahler and photographer/publisher Alec Soth. They’ll be at the Nourse Theater in November, talking with award-winning…
NYRB Joins LRB in Hole, Helps Keep Digging
As we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a…
Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker!
Dorothy Parker, American writer, editor, and critic, was born today in 1893. Parker wrote fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays (including A Star is Born, for which she received an Oscar nomination),…
Vela Magazine Lists the Unlisted
As part of its ongoing battle to get women writers the recognition they deserve, Vela has put together a “list of women writers of various forms of creative nonfiction that future list-makers…
“Sabotage” Video Recreated by Coolest Librarians Ever
You gotta fight! For your right! To check out books and return them by their due date! Some librarians who are cooler than everyone else in the world decided to…