Hell Is a Young Man: Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent
The brutality of frat culture, Nugent suggests, is a veneer that hardly masks its devotees’ miseries and insecurities.
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Reality Scooped: Talking with Tony Tulathimutte
Recent Whiting Award winner Tony Tulathimutte discusses his first novel, Private Citizens, the state of satire in 2017, “booby-trapping” identity politics, and productivity in the Internet age.
A Stand-In for New and Difficult Thinking
Clichés are tempting because they do the work of communicating for us. In a manifesto against workshop jargon, Helen Betya Rubinstein warns us of the dangers of sticking to old…
A Poet’s Arrival
The New Yorker profiles Ocean Vuong, who muses on the English language, growing up around women, Frank O’Hara, and the vestigial nature of clichés. And with his first book of…
Publishing Vocab
Editors, publishers and critics have their own industry-specific lexicon. People in the industry are used to hearing words like “acclaimed” or saying that a book “brilliantly defies categorization,” but apparently…
Book Blurb Clichés
Ever get sick of the stifling language that book reviewers use for their blurbs? There is indeed a “professional jargon” that is readily visible on the front and back of…
Cliché Shaming
At The Guardian poets reveal “the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning.” Explanations included. “Devastated” (and its variations) is a repeat winner. Is that…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
“I feel that for writers, an obsession with what is elegant or what is a cliché or not a cliché can become very inhibiting.” Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro stands…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Jonathan Lethem has been hired for David Foster Wallace’s old teaching post at Pomona. (via @maudnewton) “Lots of people in Indiana Jones hats today. I approve.” From @WriterDaniel at this…