Other
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Looking for Trump in Classic Literature
With the election putting us all on edge, and the news cycles on both political ends spouting the rhetoric of potentially unprecedented catastrophe depending on the results, let’s step back and look to literature for an answer. For example: the many…
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The Ordinary Extraordinary
In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and…
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In Conversation with Anne Carson
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. Kate Kellaway interviews poet Anne Carson for the Guardian, touching on reliability, Oscar Wilde, and passing phases like boxing. Carson’s newest collection, Float, is now…
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Notable Portland: 11/3–11/9
Thursday 11/3: YesYes Books hosts a release party for some its latest book launches, featuring The Feeder by Jennifer Jackson Berry, Blues Triumphant by Jonterri Gadson, and Juned by Jenn Marie Nunes. Food, drinks, readings, conversation, and door prizes await!…
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“A Changed World”
Don’t write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that’s not changing. Let that do the work. Paul Beatty’s formally experimental, informally humanely scathing novel about race, The Sellout, has just won…
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The Card Game Everyone Will Be Playing This Holiday Season
Electric Literature just launched a fundraising campaign for their new literary card game full of crude humor and punny jokes about favorite classic authors and works. According to its Kickstarter page, Papercuts: A Party Game for the Rude and Well-Read…
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Feminism and Silence’s Uneasy Relationship
Silence sometimes can protect you. It’s easy to think of the one who “saves herself,” who hides in the closet while the rest of the family is raped and killed by men in uniform. But silence can also protect others:…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Designing for the end of the world. Important news: the Queen has lots of tiny things. At least climate change is good for autumn leaves. Panic attacks in the animal kingdom. Amsterdam’s architecture of hospitality.
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Storytellers Just Want Connection
I’d stand in my doorway and watch lightning break in the thunderheads at the base of the mountain: threads of electricity flashing through the sky in the distance—instantaneous and then gone. Can I get an Instagram of this? I would…
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Reimagining The Tempest
How to create a credible contemporary novel from a work written four centuries ago for the stage? In a New York Times Book Review, author Emily St. John Mandel reviews Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The…
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A Writerly Conversation with Amelia Gray
In reading short story collections I always gravitated towards the shortest story, curious to find the idea expressed in the shortest amount of time. Over at the jmww blog, Jen Michalski talks to Amelia Gray about short fiction, flash fiction,…
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Publishing When Life Comes at You Fast
Meryl Williams was going to publish her roller derby memoir in 2016. Then she moved. Then she decided to move again. Some other things happened too. In a new essay for The Billfold, Williams walks us through her one step forward, two…