Posts by author
Serena Candelaria
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Revisiting Childhood
Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You can’t go home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…” Through a series of autobiographical novels, author…
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The Age of Knowledge
Lately, the news about Woody Allen has been flooding social media outlets. It’s “as if we are playing a national game of Clue,” our very own essays editor, Roxane Gay, writes in a piece featured on Salon. As people pore over…
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Nice to “Meet” You
In an essay featured on Salon, Debra Sparks recounts the events surrounding her 13 year old son’s first rendez-vous with a girl he met while playing a computer game called “Minecraft.” Sparks’s essay raises questions regarding the possibility of forging…
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Your Fantasy Is Hurting You
When listening to a song, it becomes possible to slip out of reality and into a more idealized state as Chris Wallace writes in “Your Selfie Realization.” The trouble sets in when the fantasy self does not leave. As Wallace…
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A Voice that Hums
Today, the Beats hold a noteworthy place in the American literary tradition, but there was a time when their work was met with resistance. A piece published by The New Yorker focuses on the life and work of one of…
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You Are Fated to Sleep
Sadie Stein makes the worst coffee, or so she says in the Paris Review. Her coffee is always “awful in a different way,” sometimes too bitter, and at other times, too weak. Stein reflects on her childhood love of Sleeping Beauty:…
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Bibliophilism: On Love and Addiction
It is possible to give one’s life to books, to dedicate years to collecting, reading, teaching, translating, writing, and studying them. In an essay for the New Yorker, Thomas E. Kennedy, a writer, editor, translator, and professor, reflects on his…
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When Grammar Becomes Dangerous
Those who are careful about their grammar run the risk of seeming pretentious. Strict adherence to grammar rules is sometimes written off as stuffy and elitist. There is a greater danger, however, in falling into the trap of being careless…
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Honing the Craft
Have you ever read a work of literature and envied its writer? The solution is to “steal,” or to learn from the elements that are successful, and to keep these in mind when writing a work of your own in…
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I am the fictional lead
Adam Dalva found his story in the pages of Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch (reviewed by The Rumpus here). In his essay featured on The Millions, Dalva explores the uncanny similarities between his own life and that of Theo Decker,…
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Where There Is No Whiskey
There was a time when writers drank, even in the office of The New Yorker, as Adam Gopnick shares in a recent piece. It is no secret that American literary history is colored by the number of its greats who…
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Commas, and How Complicated Things Might Really Be
When properly used, commas can be used to keep discourse clear, to bring statements together, and to suffuse language with detail. In “The Comma From Which My Heart Hangs,” Benjamin Samuel makes the case for using commas correctly, exploring the…