Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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Fingerprints, Racism, and Sherlock Holmes
Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and…
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Food Fit for a Pope
He loves Argentinian empanadas and dulce de leche. In 2015, he said that if he had only one wish, it would be to travel unrecognized to a pizzeria and have a slice—or two or three. In other words, he may…
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Finding Kafka
Was Franz Kafka really a tortured neurotic writer? A new biography shows a different side of the surreal German writer: He loved beer and slapstick. He undertook a fitness regime popularized by a Danish exercise guru. He tried to cheat on…
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Kids Books All Grown-Up
…like Franzen’s novels, the Berenstain Bear books might meander, reveling in details alternately informative and irrelevant, but ultimately they’re straightforward tales about family. (Also, as a friend pointed out to me recently, JFran sort of looks like a Berenstain Bear.…
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Michelangelo vs. Raphael
Having goaded the formerly pre-eminent Michelangelo by winning papal favour and sneaking into his as-yet unfinished Sistine Chapel, Raphael further insulted his Florentine rival in the Laocoön competition. The Public Domain Review tells the story of how the restoration of Laocoön and…
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The Work That Remains to Be Done
“I keep trying to imagine a universe in which too many public figures declaring themselves feminists would be a bad thing,” Roxane Gay, the novelist and the author of an essay collection entitled “Bad Feminist,” wrote, before concluding, “Of all…
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The Best Longreads by Women in 2015
In an effort to combat the gender byline gap in media, Autostraddle compiled a list of the 215 best longreads from 2015, all written by women. Included on the list is “Out of the Swollen Sea” by Tammy Delatorre, selected…
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The Id’s Id
If the id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like “Widening Income Inequality,” Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. The New Yorker examines the poetry (and unabashed privilege) of Frederick Seidel.
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Building a Black Literary Movement
The New York Times Magazine profiles editor Chris Jackson and how he’s building a literary movement for writers of color: ‘‘The great tradition of black art, generally,’’ he started again, ‘‘is the ability—unlike American art in general—to tell the truth.…
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Between Two Worlds
“‘We have to leave the country,’ I informed my wife as I went over the final proofs. ‘We won’t be able to stay here after this book is published.’” NPR looks at the satirical novel/memoir Native by Sayed Kashua and explores…
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A Cookbook Feud Boils Over
The Amazon reviews, and the threads leading from them, are now the length of a book, and while the contest might seem overblown—more evidence of too much boring talk about food—Kennedy is far more than just a writer of cook…
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Translating Kafka into Japanese
The Berlin-based author Yoko Tawada recently remarked that one of the difficulties she faced when translating Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis” into Japanese was that the associations Japanese people had with insects—even presumably giant beetles—were different to those of Europeans. In…