Atlantic
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It Should Have Ended With Bees
Plath chose to end her Ariel with four of the five-poem sequence Hughes buried in the middle, the so-called “bee poems.” When Sylvia Plath died, her husband Ted Hughes rearranged the poems in Ariel, Plath’s most famous collection, to reflect his…
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Realism is a Figure of Speech
For the Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, Vikram Chandra discusses the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” highlighting what makes for good “minimalism”: It’s not about what you say. It’s about what you leave out—and the intelligent reader will…
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Literary Tourists
This past week, the city [of Boston] inaugurated the nation’s first “Literary District,” a bookish spin on the state’s “Cultural District” initiative, with a website consolidating information on the neighborhood’s literary cred and a calendar of events. (Those include such…
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Stretching the Truth
At the Atlantic, Jenny Nordberg looks at what it’s like for Afghani girls, posing as boys, to put food on the table: It is simple math—if she is caught, no one eats. And every day she fears discovery. All that Niima…
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A Family Affair
I always think of you as a more novelistic novelist than I am. I’m not predisposed to like poetry. I’m not the kind of person who thinks of poetry as charming or who says of something, “it’s like poetry,” as…
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The Science of Creativity
For the Atlantic, Cody C. Delistrarty ponders whether a person can learn to be creative, or if he or she is simply born with the trait. Framing his essay on Mary Shelley and her writing process for Frankenstein, Delistrarty presents several…
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Write like an Assassin
I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space. And I just shouldn’t worry about that kind of thing while I’m working. I might pay the…
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Saving a Book’s Life
The rules of shelving can seem arbitrary, even arcane, but the fundamentals are easy to learn: two hard covers, and no more than three paperbacks of the same title, on each shelf. The exception is the face-out. If the jacket…
