essays
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore
We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means.
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Chipotle to Publish Student Work
Chipotle’s Cultivating Thought campaign, which has put essays from the likes of George Saunders and Aziz Ansari on takeout bags and soda cups, will expand next year to include a contest for young writers. Students can submit an essay on…
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Those Kinds Of People are The Only People Here
Electric Literature posts a graduation speech from Vonnegut; he riffs on World War II, busboys, ambition, and suicide notes: A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed…
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Charles D’Ambrosio’s Fast Friends
For the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering, and explains why he thinks that D’Ambrosio, in essays, has “found the perfect medium.”
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The Essay Makes a Comeback
2014 has already been called “The Year of the Debut” as a way of recognizing all the amazing debut novels published over the last twelve months. Now Jason Diamond is calling 2014 “The Year of the Essay,” pointing out the…
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
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Slouching Toward Didion
The Daily Beast takes a look at the history of the female essayist from Didion to Dunham: From cultural critic Susan Sontag and journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist (and Dunham’s mentor) Nora Ephron, and on through to the host of talented female essayists writing today,…
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A Footnotes Advocacy
Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the…
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The Unteachable Dark
Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the…
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The Last Laugh
Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates: I think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor…
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One Giant Cliché
When I became a father myself, I swore my son would never feel my absence like that—not if I could help it. I’d talk to him. I’d listen, ask questions. I’d teach him things, too, and share in the joys…