Features & Reviews
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I Married a Novelist
“What’s it like to be married to another writer?” Someone asks this question, with varying degrees of fascination, every time I do a reading. It’s as predictable as the person who laughs in all the wrong spots, or the question about…
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Poems Out Loud
For National Poetry Month, Poems Out Loud is featuring people reading their favorite poems aloud. The construction worker who describes his job as “a lot of digging” loves Walt Whitman, and not just because he writes about “common Americans” and…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Glass Castle
The problem with reading a modern memoir is that often they suck. The influx of reality shows and confessional writing (ahem, Tori Spelling) has placed an emphasis on story and less on literary craft. This is why when I read…
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Looking for a Hole to Hide In
Illustrator Nat Russell can’t remember a time he didn’t draw. Taking in Peanuts and Mad Magazine like popcorn and then the works of printmaker Antonio Frasconi and Ben Shahn, Russell’s lines show their roots in those great illustrators as…
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Scrawl Girl
What does it mean to draw outside the lines? Allison Benis White sketches it out in Self-Portrait with Crayon.
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That Old Philogelos—Up To His Old Tricks!
Classicist Mary Beard has discovered a joke book from the 4th century AD, filled with rib-ticklers from the late Roman Empire. Just like today, the old egghead is a source of tremendous humor, along with other frequently targeted figures of…
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Show Your Work!
Matthew Zapruder proposes we meet the current explosion of variety coursing through contemporary poetry head-on with a new kind of criticism. Zapruder wants critics to talk a little less about what the poem said and a little more about how…
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The Ground Beneath Their Feet
Aaron Gwyn’s novel describes a world in which people can fall through the surface of the earth and be snatched by a mythological creature, never to be heard from again.
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Mr. J.D.
Once again a journalist turns up at J.D. Salinger’s house, and once again gets turned away. In Japan — not being in easy driving distance of Cornish, NH — they must turn to Blankey Jet City’s song “Salinger,” with its…
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American Short Stories
A.O. Scott gives a nice shout out to the craft of American short stories in the New York Times, particularly praising, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme. For more on Cheever, Slate ran a review of his newest biography.…