Posts by author
Mary Allen
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You Write Like A Girl, Knausgaard
Domestic duties are regarded as feminine in popular culture. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous three volume tome, My Struggle, is full of descriptions of domesticity, and he has been showered with highbrow literary praise for them. But would the same be…
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An Argument Against Spinelessness
Considering the other forces vying to demarcate our time, dividing it up between mass shootings and other traumas, to encounter a packed bookshelf, a library, or a bookstore with a breathtaking procession of spines and all the potential therein—it is…
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The Keeper of Weirdness
Our love of libraries is nothing new, but there are a particular breed of libraries less discussed—the college library. Book Riot has written a love letter to collegiate libraries and all the weirdness that lives there.
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Welcome to the Future of Reading
Wally Lamb’s forthcoming novel is being published exclusively as an app. Yes, you read that correctly. More on Electric Literature.
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Is Writing Art or Profession?
For those who start within the establishment, professional writing is likely to correspond to drudgery, and they’ll seek to escape it. For those on the outside looking in, it’s a mark of legitimacy. The reasons behind why writers write is…
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A Novel’s Worth in Gold
Can Haruki Murakami write a financially unsuccessful novel at this point in his career? What would it take for him, or a writer with a similar sales history, to fail to sell? And what does this tell us about the…
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Video Games as Poetry
Space in video games is not, strictly speaking, physical. It’s made of pixels on a screen, and the movement of objects within it are governed by the algorithms of its central processing unit. This artificiality has the ironic effect of…
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Women Don’t Read Real Books
Call it “Goldfinching,” after Vanity Fair’s 2014 yes-but-is-it-art interrogation as to whether Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning, mega-bestselling book The Goldfinch is or is not literature. It’s the process by which a popular and previously well-regarded novel and, more importantly, its…
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Marginalized
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written.…
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Make Your Writing A Beautiful Mess
A lovely and thoughtful argument for writing with a pencil. Hear her out before you decide.
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From Being Definite to Indefinite
There is a vanishing point in our humanity, a point at which the other goes from being definite to indefinite. But this point is also the locus for the opposite movement, in which the other goes from indefinite to definite—and…
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Living with the Cloud
How did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral—all vapor and crystal? The New Yorker explores how the metaphor of “the cloud” is shaping how we experience the Internet.