Posts by author
Olivia Wetzel
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Who Cares Who Wrote Shakespeare?
At Guernica, Tana Wojczuk shares her personal story of seeing Shakespeare performed as a child and her eventual realization and understanding of Shakespeare’s humor, and defends the importance of seeing Shakespeare’s works on stage: This is one of the reasons it…
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More Magic Than Movies
Books live in our collective unconscious as well as our individual imaginations. It’s best to air these stories occasionally so that we may examine the myths we hold dearly. Movies may be messy but they can be viewed en masse,…
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Girly, Arty Angst
At the Atlantic, Amy Weiss-Meyer discusses debut authors Rebecca Schiff and Abigail Ulman, placing them, along with writer Lena Dunham, in a group of authors that critic Harold Rosenberg calls a “mass culture of individuals:” Theirs is a literary ecosystem fueled…
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Much Dying to Do
Jenna Le reviews Vi Khi Nao’s new book of poetry, The Old Philosopher. While calling it “experimental” poetry, Le claims that Nao’s works are “readable,” with an “informal voice,” unlike much experimental poetry: There is a worldly, cosmopolitan sensibility at…
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A for Effort
Lit Hub has just released Book Marks, a book review aggregator which provides a grading system for books. At The Stranger, Rich Smith talks about what this means, grade inflation, and more: The point of a book review isn’t to sell books…
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Sleeping with Machetes
At the New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson reviews Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing. In this new novel, Gyasi explores the consequences of slavery in 18th-century America and West Africa: Throughout, the focus is on the wounds inflicted on the colonized and the…
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Lessons from Frog and Toad
At the Atlantic, Bert Clere reflects on Arnold Lobel’s children’s books, Frog and Toad and Owl at Home, the lessons these stories try to teach, and the representation of the self in each of them: Although Frog and Toad’s world is perhaps more…
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On the Auction Table
The supposedly lost letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac that inspired Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, was found in 2014. Now, the letter is being auctioned off: The 16,000-word typed letter, which carries an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000,…
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The Dreamer Gazing
Using examples like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Laura Miller analyzes our modern concept of what an “allegory” is, in comparison to how the word has historically been used to describe literature, and how…
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Vast Questions About Our Humanity
Alexis Deacon and Vivian Schawrz’s ” groundbreaking philosophy book for toddlers,” I Am Henry Finch, just won the 2016 Little Rebels Children’s Book Award. The award recognizes children’s books that address social justice and equality for youth: Their picture book is about a…
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Rooted Elsewhere
Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England,…
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Make Like Bunnies
BBC One and Netflix are joining forces to produce a four-part miniseries of Watership Down. The new series intends to give the female rabbits a more prevalent role: On the bright side, Aitken did announce the miniseries’ intent to strengthen…