Blogs
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Peculiar Benefits
What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.
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Inmost, by Jessica Fisher
Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come…
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SELF-MADE MAN #9: Passing
I don’t know if this is the biology of it, but on the day of my testosterone shot sometimes I think I can feel my vocal chords widening, a throaty expansion.
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A Letter to the People Who Wrote Letters to Each Other
A month ago we announced Letters to Each Other, which allowed subscribers to Letters in the Mail to send a one page letter and SASE.
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Today’s Required Reading
At Guernica, Randa Jarrar writes about this one time when she tried to visit her sister in Palestine and she was deported by Israel. I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult…
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Lit-Link Round-up
Finally, my interview with the luminous Cheryl Strayed, aka “Sugar,” is up at Bookslut! Very fine piece too, this same issue of Bookslut, on Susan Sontag. The latest installment of Literary Disco, the incorrigible Tod Goldberg’s latest three-way endeavor, is…
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Is Optimism About the Future of “Serious” Publishing Possible?
In the kind of defeated sigh about the future of books that is increasingly commonplace, Sarah Weinman, the news editor at Publisher’s Marketplace, argues that in the digital age there’s no room for “serious nonfiction.” The gist of her argument…
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Coming to That by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning’s Coming to That is a book full of imagination, creativity, and intellect.
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The Rumpus Interview with Julianna Baggott
Julianna Baggott’s Pure is about a post-apocalyptic world where the responsibility for changing and saving civilization lies with children.
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Between the Crackups, by Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range in tone; they are frustrated, sorrowful, sometimes funny, sometimes contemplative.…
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The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us
I enjoy fairy tales because I need to believe, despite my cynicism, that there is a happy ending for everyone, for me.