Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Peter Orner + Isaac Fitzgerald = Awesome Reading
Bay Area folks: Rumpus columnist Peter Orner will talk with Rumpus co-owner/former managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald about his upcoming collection of short stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. It sounds like a Rumpus event, but it’s actually a Litquake event, and it’s happening…
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Happy Birthday, James Baldwin!
Happy birthday to James Baldwin, who would have been 89 today. A pioneering author of fiction, essays, plays, and poetry, Baldwin explored what it meant to be black and gay long before such themes became acceptable to the mainstream. He…
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How Do You Say “Ollie” in Pashto?
In Kabul, Afghanistan, Oliver Percovich runs an NGO unlike any other: a skateboarding school for kids, called Skateistan. Interestingly, in a country where girls are generally not allowed to ride bicycles (and are even sometimes attacked for going to school), almost…
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Margaret Cho Gets Hysterical
Clayton Cubitt’s “Hysterical Literature” project, “a viral video art series exploring mind/body dualism, distraction portraiture, and the contrast between culture and sexuality,” features women—often porn actresses or burlesque performers—trying to read out loud from books while someone under a table…
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Be Kind—You Won’t Regret It
Check out George Saunders’s graduation speech to the students of Syracuse University, where he is a professor. It’s rife with exhortations to kindness and references to monkey-borne illnesses. You know, the usual. So here’s something I know to be true,…
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Peter Orner at Recommended Reading
She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. For…
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The Dark Secret of the Old Silicon Valley
In 1983, “Silicon Valley” meant something different: different tech companies were dominating for different reasons, in different areas of California’s Santa Clara County. The Atlantic’s Alexis C. Madrigal went to look at what remained of that Silicon Valley from thirty years…
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Do We Really Need Another Self Portrait?
A few months ago, we sang the praises of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde with an essay from Helena Fitzgerald. This month, CBS Records is releasing bootlegs/session tracks from a different, much less beloved Dylan album: Self Portrait. Kevin Courrier has some thoughts…
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American Book Cover in Paris (and Lots of Other Foreign Places)
SF Gate has a neato slideshow comparing American book covers to their foreign editions. Sometimes they change barely at all (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones), while sometimes they’re unrecognizable—Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements gets not only a visual redesign but a whole new…
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Happy Birthday, Herman Melville!
At the time of this posting, the 29th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon has about three hours left of its 24-hour reading of Herman Melville’s classic novel. When the reading finishes, attendees will celebrate Melville’s birthday “in old-fashioned style with song and cake.”…
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When Incorrect Grammar Is Just the Right Thing
Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a nifty recurring feature called “Making Progress,” in which they interview writers about their process during projects that are still unfinished. In the latest installment, James Yeh has some really enchanting thoughts about “language that is…
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Listen to Sylvia Plath Read Her Poems Out Loud
Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.” They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when…