genre
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Talk Literary to Me
The artist statement is not just a representation of what you are working on, but an intervention in what you are working on. If you start saying, I aim to do this and not to do this, maybe it keeps…
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Unlabelling Gender and Genre
I wonder about this in terms of genre. Just as I don’t want to identify as non-binary, regardless of the potential room for accuracy, I don’t want to identify as a “writer of neither genres.” But how much does want…
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The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein
Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as “an idea that someone else pushes back on.”
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A Better Look at Science Fiction
In an excerpt from the introduction to their new book The Big Book of Science Fiction, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer explore what they identify as the three strains of science fiction (via the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.…
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Us, as Humans, Feel Like Failures
It just means that we have a desire for our language to be able to perform in a different way than it performs, and we have a desire for a reconciliation between the individual and the social that poetry can’t fulfill,…
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Breaking the Script
There’s a tendency to take writers who write about race and shuffle them into a genre, into a predetermined conversation, whether they wanted to be there or not. But even if the constraints of the game are rigged, what Jenny…
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All the Time Dissolving
Wherever the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, Geoff Dyer has long since crossed it. For Hazlitt, Kyle Chayka talked to the author of White Sands about the continuum of the critical and the narrative: If people call it an essay…
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Only the Romance
Writing for Open Letters Monthly, Rohan Maitzen reviews the conclusion of The Survivors’ Club, a seven-book romance series by Mary Balogh. Maitzen uses the series to explore the formulaic nature of the genre along with the individuality of every romance novel.
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Blame Harry Potter for Your Girlfriend Going Gone Girl
The then-girls, now-women who grew up reading Harry Potter are revitalizing the book market and steering publishing trends, and here’s what they want now: crime thriller fiction featuring calculating and vengeful female protagonists, now its own genre umbrella-ed by the…
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Mind Over Genre
Over at Lit Hub, Jennifer R. Bernstein confronts the disciplinary rift that has grown between psychology and literature to show how the two are linked, even nested inside one another in our studies of self and pain: For these authors…
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Writers: Be Bold!
To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of oneself. … It is a difficult joy to risk something new as a writer. But it is a joy nonetheless. Author and translator Idra Novey knows…
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Short Revolution
Great novels also experiment and innovate, but a short story can make a never-before-seen formal leap and then peace out, before you’re even sure what’s happened. At Electric Literature, Rebecca Schiff introduces us to the authors who have revolutionized the…