Columns
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Writing Truth
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Colin Dickey explores the idea of the contemporary American essay as a vehicle for truth. Citing essayists such as John D’Agata, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, Dickey writes: How do you know…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Not ready to leave the conventions behind, let’s compare the state roll call brags. Wait,why are all the corpse flowers blooming now? I’m going to miss the lil slimers but it’s probably time to stop breeding bulldogs. Vikings were buried…
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Amber Dawn
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?
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Conceptualizing the Vagina
At Lit Hub, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares an excerpt of her new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, exploring the cultural understandings and depictions of female genitalia from Shakespeare’s “No thing” to Jamie McCartney’s The…
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Just Fail Your Best
Tim Falconer writes for Hazlitt on the psychological importance of failure: When you do what you’re good at exclusively, avoiding what you are bad at, you live in an evaluative world, one that’s full of judgement…. The danger is this…
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Remembering Lou Reed
It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since Lou Reed’s passing. In remembrance of his work and legacy, Laurie Anderson organized a day-long tribute to her late husband on Saturday, with readings, exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts. Readers of Reed’s lyrics…
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Women and Workplace Fiction
Over at the New Yorker, Lydia Kiesling writes about workplace fiction, typically seen as a male-centric dominion overseen by writers like Kafka, as written by women from Helen Phillips in The Beautiful Bureaucrat to Terry McMillan in How Stella Got…
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Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn
Tonight my loneliness is infinite and I could eat dinner or dance with my limbs wild because there is no gravity keeping me grounded.
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The World’s Nicest Dad
Sara Benincasa‘s latest book, Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad, has made its way onto the bestseller lists on Amazon and Kindle since its electronic release on Friday. The 26-page book, a parody of Tim Kaine as “the world’s nicest dad,” was…
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Embers to Screen for One Week in Los Angeles
Embers, the movie featured in our article “The Great Film Festival Swindle,” is playing in Los Angeles for one week only at the Arclight Hollywood starting August 5. Our friends at Slamdance are hosting the screening (seriously, we love these guys).…
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Opening up via Translation
At Lit Hub, Christina Farella examines the exchange of cultural ideas that comes with translation, using Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai as an example of books enriched by engaging with other languages in the English text itself.
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Notable Los Angeles: 8/1–8/7
Monday 8/1: Ian Gurvitz discusses and signs Welcome to Dumbfuckistan: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America. 7 p.m at Book Soup. An evening of poetry featuring Laurel Ann Bogen, Gail Wronsky, and Holaday Mason. 7 p.m. at Vroman’s…