Posts by author
Mary Allen
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Wonderfully Witchy
A totally fantastic new comic of literary witches over at Electric Literature. Let your day get a bit magical.
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Like Thoreau, But Not
Writers for generation have sought out the solitude of the wilderness to get their work done. But sometimes it’s not as romantic as we hope.
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Right on Time
The debate has typically been framed around whether it is ever appropriate for a writer to reference Seinfeld, Bright Eyes, or Facebook. What makes more sense is to talk about whether or not doing so is helpful for the specific…
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Immortalizing History
Literature continually reminds us that we are not alone and (to paraphrase Kundera) that things are not always as simple as they seem. With so many stories, histories, characters and figures populating a reader’s mind, it’s easy for us to…
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But Is It Dangerous?
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has recently become legal to publish and sell in Germany for the first time since World War II. What place does this volume hold in our collective world history? And should it be regarded as a…
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Can Creativity Be Taught?
Is creativity something we are born with? Can it only be nurtured, or can it be taught? Scientist discuss this age-old question for PRI.
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Shocking the American Short Story
Three more anthologies published last year suggest that while the [short] story remains one of our most flexible popular literary forms, and the quickest to absorb signals from the culture, if we’re on the verge of another revolution, the shockwaves…
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Publishing in an Age of Immediacy
As the value of an individual book is devalued, so is the self. We are made to feel that it’s only through constant communication with a community that we have any collective power. How has the immediacy of the Internet…
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1984 or 2016?
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Rohde gives a thorough and chilling analyzation of our current socio-political climate which highlights just how closely our world parallels the one that George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984: No one…
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Shakespeare’s First Folio, Coming to a City Near You!
The Folger has 82 First Folios—the largest collection in the world. It’s located several stairways down, in a rare manuscript vault. To reach them, you first have to get through a fire door … (if a fire did threaten these…