Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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The Persistence and Procrastination of Artists
How much time should be spent on a single work of art? Or inversely, how will the amount of time spent on a work ultimately shape what that work will become and what it will mean to the creator? What…
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An Author Defends Amazon
As the Amazon-Hachette war rages on, it seems that not many writers have any kind words for Amazon. But in Slate, author Neal Pollack can’t seem to say enough nice things.
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The Lost Pulp of Gore Vidal
Before he became an acclaimed novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal was just a guy trying to make ends meet. Under three different pseudonyms, Vidal wrote a romance novel, three mysteries, and a crime thriller. Now, over 50 years later, …
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Poems from Guantanamo
In 2010, French poet Frank Smith took the transcripts of the initial combatant status review tribunals from Guantanamo and turned them into a book of poetry. The New Inquiry looks at Vanessa Place’s recent English translation of Smith’s Guantanamo.
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Teach the Class You Want to Take
You get bored if you don’t teach what you’re interested in, so in some ways you create a course you wish you would have taken. The Believer blog has an interview with author and teacher Matthea Harvey about how she…
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A Puzzling Gender Gap
When I was twenty, I submitted a puzzle that [Will Shortz] rejected. He cited MALE GAZE among the entries he found unworthy of publication. I don’t doubt that a woman or a younger editor might have deemed that entry an…
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“Short Attention Span is the New Avant-Garde”
In the final installment of its “What Would Twitter Do?” series, The Believer talks to MoMA Poet Laureate Kenneth Goldsmith about how he views Twitter and its relationship to writing.
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Books about Books
In 2011, Phyllis Rose read every book on the LEQ-LES shelf in the New York Public Library and wrote about the experience in an essay collection called The Shelf. In doing so, Rose joined the long tradition of “bibliomemoirs”—a blend…
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The Downside of Owning a Bookstore
Garrison Keillor is the host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” an author, and the owner of an independent bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, but even he doesn’t get everything he wants: …the worst thing [about the bookselling business] is that…
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a Gas
In the early 1800s, anyone who was anyone in British high society was part of a hot new trend: inhaling laughing gas. The Public Domain Review takes a look at the nitrous oxide fad and some of its more prominent…
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Using French to Find English
Sixty years ago, Samuel Beckett published Waiting for Godot, a self-translated English version of his original French play, En Attendant Godot. Elizabeth Winkler writes for The Millions about how Beckett’s bilingual writing practices influenced his work and vexed scholars.
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The Life and Death of Twerk
The American Reader has a new series examining the lifespan of American slang. In the first installment, Michael Reid Roberts looks at the history of “shade” and “twerk.”