Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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I Know What You Read Last Summer
More and more, book publishers are turning to data studies and algorithms to predict which kinds of books will sell. Susanne Althof, in a piece for WIRED, interrogates the wisdom of such an approach, speaking with people in the industry…
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Poetic Citizens
Over at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center blog, Suzi F. Garcia challenges the idea of poetry as a niche act of the elites by showing just how vital and contagious teaching a text like Citizen can be: Move poetry…
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Passing in Football
The fear of expulsion from that collective black-boy body, of being deemed not black enough or male enough or straight enough, counterfeit somehow, terrified me. As football comes under increasing scrutiny from all sides, Frederick McKindra, over at BuzzFeed, pens…
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Fear and Loathing
For Lambda Literary, Christopher Soto talks with Brenda Shaughnessy about her new collection of poetry and how she relates to her writing as someone who is already four collections in. She outlines the ways in which her work has been…
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Happy Endings
So I didn’t understand how radical The Price of Salt was, how strange and fabulist it is in parts, how hallucinatory and real. I didn’t know how revelatory a book could be to a life lived trying so hard to…
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White Noise
Over at Hazlitt, Morgan Jerkins unpacks our collective literary fascination with white suburban boredom, connecting the historical dots between these dry developments and the redlining that created them, while also highlighting the fact that the at root of boredom is…
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Stranger Than Fiction
I read the Assistant Warden’s e-mail four or five times, but I still could not grasp its implications. All I could think about was the ten copies of Toni Morrison’s Beloved I had just bought. For Lit Hub, Mikita Brottman…
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In the Air Tonight
Over at Guernica, Jennifer Baum explores the poetics and the politics of soot, interweaving stories of her childhood growing up in a deeply polluted New York with a timeline of environmental laws and stats: The flakes of black soot, which…
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“Specialists in All Styles”
In an interview with Tobias Carroll for Men’s Journal, Teju Cole discusses his affinity for the work of writer and critic John Berger, and how that relationship has informed his own writing: I think what we get from the artists,…
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Barbizon Revisited
For Lit Hub, Nathan Hill takes us through the history of the Barbizon Hotel, recounting its role as an incubator for young women writers of the mid-20th century and as a landmark for those same writers to touch upon and…
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By the People, for the People
At Guernica, Tana Wojcznick unpacks Shakespeare’s lesser-known and often-misread play, Coriolanus, to bring us s its timely political warning about populism and democracy: It’s no accident that Coriolanus is not a favorite in America, where it’s rarely included in the…
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Child’s Play
Not a day goes by that there isn’t some new study on how children’s brains work and what kind of media they should be consuming, With all the scientifically backed books out there now, it’s good to also have some…