Posts by author
Sam Metz
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Saeed Jones Lights up Different Forms of Humanity
For Brooklyn Magazine, Molly McArdle profiles poet, essayist, and BuzzFeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones. McArdle solicits Jones’s thoughts on diversity in media and describes him as a “literary citizen” for his work with BuzzFeed’s Reader vertical and the Emerging Writers’ Fellowship program.…
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Aziz Nesin’s Ghost
This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century…
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Travel Writing as Artifact
At the Public Domain Review, Nandini Das revisits The Principle Navigations and argues that the massive folio of travel writings compiled by Richard Hakluyt in 1589 is more than an artifact of British colonialism. It also memorializes, “the elusive traces of those…
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The Truth of Brushstrokes or Brushstrokes of Truth?
Autofiction is in these days. Discussing her first novel Fantasian at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins blog, Larissa Pham unpacks her perspective on inserting autobiographical elements into fiction: I knew that no matter what I wrote in my…
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What It Means to Write at a Coffee Shop
When you’re a freelance writer — or any type of freelancer — you make yourself a lot of promises, mostly about getting out of the house and about wearing real, non-pajama clothing. But with no one to hold you accountable, these promises often go…
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Off the Mainstream Map
For Bitch Media, Rumpus Funny Women Editor Elissa Bassist interviews writer-actress Roberta Colindrez on her recent roles in Amazon’s adaptation of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and the Broadway adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, two powerful narratives centered on…
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High Fidelity: Anita Raja on Translation
The editors at Asymptote Journal certainly couldn’t have expected Elena Ferrante to be outed when they planned their October 2016 issue, which includes Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova’s translation of a 2015 speech given by Anita Raja. In “Translation as…
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The Poet and the City
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Kessler takes us through a pantheon of his favorite Los Angeles landmarks. He writes: Buildings are constructed and routinely erased, yet they remain implanted in the native’s mind like seeds of some…
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Let’s Reinvigorate Death
Julian Hanna reviews Stefany Anne Goldberg and Morgan Meis’s Dead People at 3:AM Magazine. The book eulogizes twenty-nine people Goldberg and Meis handpicked themselves with short obituaries. Hanna writes that the twenty-nine obituaries all offer, “something lively and curious.” Each is, “an…
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Dreams, Manifestos, and What Times Are Best for Writing
For Playboy, Alexandra Kleeman (You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine) interviews Colin Winnette. On writing his most recent novel Haints Stay, Winnette says his process was like “spending a year or so in my own private Western.” On his short…
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“Home Not At Home”
After Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted and executed by General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, his son Murtaza went into exile and organized a resistance from the UK, Syria, and Afghanistan, where his daughter Fatima Bhutto was born. Bhutto documented…
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Porn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her own piece on porn, writing a genre-bending essay that can best…