Posts by author
Sam Metz
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Sex, Money, and Art Forgery
“Novels about psychically and sexually burdened paintings have a rich literary pedigree,” writes UNC Professor of Art History Maggie Cao for Public Books. Cao’s essay tackles the subject of forgery, which puts “the intimate, almost magical role that works of art play…
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Thank You, Editors
For Hazlitt, Steven Price writes a beautiful elegy to his former editor, Ellen Seligman. Seligman and Price collaborated on Price’s By Gaslight, published in August, five months after Seligman’s passing. Editing, at its highest level, is surely a creative act.…
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Don’t Look Away
Leah Mirakhor interviews Homegoing author Yaa Gyasi for the Los Angeles Review of Books. On her novel and Ness, a primary character, Gyasi says: This novel was an attempt for me to say: We cannot look away when something like…
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We Love You, Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge, author most recently of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books) provides her take on Lionel Shriver’s recent remarks at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival for the New York Times. Greenidge recalls writing her first novel in which there was an…
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A Death Blow Can Be a Life Blow to Some
What does it mean to be carried away? To be captured, carried off, liberated? To lose control of oneself? Lerner doesn’t show concern for questions like these. More generally, The Hatred of Poetry takes little interest in the rarities of…
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How Albert Camus Wrote a French Classic
Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation catapulted Albert Camus’s The Stranger into the center of conversation in many literary circles. After helping get Camus’s Algerian Chronicles published in English in 2013, Alice Kaplan’s latest effort, Looking For The Stranger, explains how…
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The Brisbane Effect
For The New Republic, Suki Kim writes of Lionel Shriver’s remarks in Brisbane, “I had been invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival as a writer, but now I was here, foremost, as an Asian” and how the controversy shifted the…
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Photography and What It Means to Be Anti-Racist
Photography is often considered “objective”—a technology with the ability to capture people, things and places as they were during one moment in time. The art form has a long history of depicting race powerfully in America, both in disproving difference…
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Life as a Whole Foods Cashier
Writers are accustomed to having other jobs and before working at Esquire and Vanity Fair, Lucie Shelly found meaning in the trials and tribulations of being a Whole Foods cashier. Over at Catapult, Shelly writes nostalgically about feeling “needed, productive, and healthy” and her brief fling with a…
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Revisiting Attica
If you’ve been reading about the nationwide prisoner strike, perhaps pick up Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water. The recently released nonfiction title returns readers to the Attica Prison riots. It, “reminds one generation, and informs others,” that New York state’s handling…