Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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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 October. That deluxe edition will include illustrations from none other…
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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 and Other Apocalypses. To celebrate those myriad armageddons, come to…
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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 stake out provocative claims frequently and aggressively, without worrying too…
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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. McKinley writes about it in fascinating detail for the Virginia Quarterly…
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“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 weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she…
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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 in 1983’s literary eye, the AV Club rounded up ten…
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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 of lays out the details and holds back on the…
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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 San Francisco writer Steven Winn about the latest in their…
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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 number of publications. The New York Review of Books‘ ratio has…
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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), and is remembered in particular for her acid wit. A…
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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 and anthologists…might peruse and thereby make their “bests” and “greats”…
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“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 remake the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video but with tough-love librarians…