Posts by tag
Atlantic
20 posts
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…