The Whiteness of Literary Events
It’s daunting knowing that you will be the only one of your kind at some of these events. When you’ve been made to feel your otherness so concretely in the…
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Mary Allen
112 posts
Mary Allen is a writer working, crafting, and making bad puns in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Poetry’s Love Affair with the Internet
We already knew that the Internet is a wild and wonderful place for poets, but the web is also empowering verse offline. The New York Times reports on how the…
Books for Pennies
Are the stories on pages of the books we love actually worth something in a monetary sense? If you ask sellers of bargain books, they may tell you those books…
Digital World, Digital Library
Why do we need physical libraries in the age of Wikipedia? What does a library look like in the digital age? The New York Review of Books explains how librarians…
I’m Sorry, Who?
One of the things I run into surprisingly often is people saying to me, ‘I’ve never heard of you before’… Yet I’ve been publishing in ‘mainstream’ journals and my book…
The Power of the Ellipses
The Guardian presents a history of this tantalizing punctuation. They’re irresistible…
Scarf as Signifier
In honor of the upcoming centennial birthday of French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, Hermés is releasing a limited-edition scarf designed in his honor. The New Yorker will gladly…
For the Love of Weird Women
Weird Fiction Review finds us some weird fiction written by women we all should be reading.
The Freedom of Fiction
Literature may be weak because it has no real power in the world, but in a way it is the grandest narrative of all, in that it puts ourselves into…
You Don’t Mess with Shakespeare
Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language… It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way,…
Write What You Don’t Know
If we only write what we know, when do we get to use our imaginations? The Millions explores the art of writing things we don’t know.