Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“The Delusion That Women Couldn’t Hurt Me”
Our rock-star essays editor Roxane Gay kills it again, this time with an essay at Autostraddle about the women she’s loved and how her queerness shaped her life. Here’s a little snippet of her writing and its understated power: I told…
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Crazy Amazing TV Show
A seemingly unemployed wannabe poet, Stony secures the opportunity by winning the “Blast-Off Space Food” jingle contest and, despite confused protest from his mother, is whisked away to undergo an intensive, three-month astronautic crash course. Would you believe us if…
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“Black to the Future”
Black to the future was/is a radical, dangerous, and daring dream—an impossibility. Science fiction and fantasy (sf&f) is a rehearsal of the impossible, an ideal realm for redefinition and reinvention. For Africans and their descendants in the diaspora, decolonizing our…
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Ashley Farmer Release Party in SF
If you live in the Bay Area, you owe it to yourself to make it out to this release party for Ashley Farmer’s book Beside Myself, out from our essays editor Roxane Gay‘s own Tiny Hardcore Press. THP—and its associated litmag, PANK—are…
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Trans* Litmag THEM in Print, Accepting Submissions
Groundbreaking trans* literary magazine THEM, launched online last year, is now re-releasing its first issue in print. If you missed out on it the first time, this is the perfect opportunity to acquaint yourself with the multigenre journal and its commitment…
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Successful Writers You’ve Never Heard Of
Previously, we blogged about Jennifer Weiner’s battle to shine the spotlight of literary respect on genre fiction written by women. At Harper’s, Jesse Barron looks at Weiner’s campaigning from the angle of old media vs. new media rather than literary fiction vs.…
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“That Pesky Racism Again”
For Human Parts, the dazzling collection of essays curated by Stephanie Georgopulos on Medium, Djenab Conde writes about the complexities of eating at a Chinese restaurant with her Chinese mother and Guinean father. Conde writes about how frustrating it is…
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70 Years of Penguin Design
We all have a few Penguin books on our shelves, with their characteristic splash of orange and that cute little black-and-white Antarctic avian. But how well do you really know Penguin’s cover design? On her graphic-design blog Design Context, Lizzy…
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Prejudice Not Gone from Figure Skating
We recently blogged about the Believer’s incredible essay about ’90s figure skating and the rivalry between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. At Racialicious, Kendra James talks about her experience figure skating as a black woman, and how her race has…
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Submit Stories and Songs to New Lit Podcast
You’ve heard of audiobooks, but what about audio-litmags? Palaver Press is now accepting submissions of short fiction, songs, and sound works on the themes “piano” and “da capo” for new ninety-minute podcasts that “will feature several narrated short-stories, seamlessly woven…
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Writing When Your Day Job Is Also Writing
The Believer‘s blog has a really splendid interview with writer, editor, and UN employee Summer Brennan. Brennan talks to Nicolle Elizabeth about what it’s like to write non-creatively for a living, and then come home to write some more but on…
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Shocking News: Writers are Poor
If anyone was still laboring under the impression that writing is a lucrative business, a new report from Digital Book World is here to pulverize your hopes and dreams. After interviewing 10,000 authors at all different points in their careers,…