Other
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Lit-Link Round-up
This is cool: The Handsome Family in the New Yorker. Allison Amend’s A Nearly Perfect Copy is called “delectable” by Alan Cheuse on NPR. Caroline Leavitt does the TNB Self-Interview.
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Links I Like
My TROP interview with Aisha Sabatini Sloan led me to an interview with Maya Angelou. After I read the interview with Maya Angelou, I decided it was time to read “An Interview: Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde” in Sister Outsider. I’ve been…
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Notable Los Angeles: 5/18-5/24
Saturday 5/18: Today is the last stop in UC Irvine MFA students off-campus reading tour. Fiction writers Blake Kimzey and Justin Lee, and poets Josh Cornwell and Meagan Cooney will present their work. 5 p.m. at Skylight Books. Sunday 5/19: Giant Robot is…
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Your Reader and Your Character Walk Into a Bar…
Do they have a drink together? Are they both fully formed, real people? Does it even matter? The conversation sparked recently by Claire Messud continues in a New Yorker forum, including responses from Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen.
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Exploring the Redwood Forest: Journals and the Private Self
Lately, over crumb-laden dinner tables and cups of coffee and on windy hillsides I ask friends, family, and peripheral acquaintances whether or not they write in a journal.
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The Need for “No”
For an artist, saying no to anything but the art is strength training for the muscle required to say yes to work, yes to creation. At Medium, Kevin Ashton tells a story of saying no: “A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote…
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Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
Some scientific experiments can sound ridiculous, especially to us writerly types—like, for instance, a study measuring mosquitoes’ attraction to limburger cheese. There’s even a fake prize dedicated to mocking such studies: the “Ig Nobel,” which the aforementioned mosquito story won…
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The Questionably Healthy Habits of Highly Creative People
Do you work better during the morning or the evening? With a shot of espresso or a mug of green tea? An intriguing little Slate series documents the work habits of writers and other creative people, from Ernest Hemingway to David…
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Is The Great Gatsby Worth Seeing?
Want to see the new film version of The Great Gatsby but afraid it won’t live up to the book? At The Millions, five English professors pass judgment on the success of the adaptation. Read it to find out what additional…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Venezuela is out of toilet paper. Behold the Alternative Limb Project. If I’m reading this correctly, I could really use some electrical brain shocks. And now you’re midcentury design for the day, available in school library poster or Buckminster Fuller…
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Yo Mama So Old She’s a Scandinavian Root Word
These etymological origins of words related to insults are so strange and wonderful that some of them almost seem made up. For example, it seems there used to be enough people writing “snarky epic poems” in Scandinavia that their title, skald, became…
