Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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Fiction Can’t Be Any Worse Than Real Life
The Oxford American talks to John McManus about his new short story collection, Fox Tooth Heart, and how he feels about his fiction being called “depraved”: I don’t know what world people are living in where they find stories in…
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Artists as Activists
I was recently asked by a young interviewer if writing, with all the time it takes and its use of paper (though I compose on a computer) is not antithetical to what is needed now, the speed that is, to…
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Art as a Tool for Action
Over at NPR, Molly Crabapple discusses her new memoir Drawing Blood, her involvement in Occupy Wall Street, and how she became a political artist: …for a long time I felt like going to protests was the same as—you know, when people…
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George Saunders and Donald Trump
George Saunders! America’s greatest satirist! The heir to Mark Twain’s estate! And I thought, Oh, what I wouldn’t give to hear Saunders weigh in on Trump. And then I remembered that, in a way, he already had. At the Kenyon…
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The Science of the Supernatural
Certain people, Barrett decided, were… exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses.” He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and…
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You’re Such a Gollum
A man is facing two years in prison after comparing Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the Lord of the Rings character, Gollum. However, the judge in the case isn’t sure that the comparison is really an insult: The judge adjourned…
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The Continuing Struggles of Mexican-Americans
For many Mexican-Americans, Trump’s campaign is nothing new. It fits within repeating cycles of attraction and rejection for Mexican immigrants in this country and connects with a long history of challenges that citizens of Mexican descent have faced to their…
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Gloria Steinem Hits the Road
The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic “Odyssey,” of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it’s really about a man on the road. There’s an assumption…
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The Importance of Moby-Dick
The affronted world’s Ahabs, crippled by attack, vow vengeance and a show of might. At The Kenyon Review blog, Karen Malpede talks about her experience of reading Moby-Dick out loud every night and explains why the book is still relevant…
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A Misreading of Misery
NPR traces the history of Stephen King’s Misery from the novel, to the film, and, most recently, to the stage, and argues that this journey may have caused the story t0 lose a few key components: It is almost literally drained of…
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The Empathy of Latin America
I can’t say I was surprised by the level of empathy my barber expressed for the victims of the Paris attacks, though I was intrigued by the empathy of a man whose daily life is so intertwined with the drug…
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Another Country
Donald Quist talks to Liz Blood at Awst Press about some of his favorite writers, his graduate school experience, living as an ex-pat in Thailand, and his recent essay up on The Rumpus: I was a little fearful publishing that essay. I…