The Underground Railroad has always fascinated Americans, and recently it has exploded in popularity, with books, TV shows, and even representation on United States currency. But does the mythologized version of the Underground Railroad live up to actual history? In a recent New Yorker article, Kathryn Schulz examines recent media incarnations of the Railroad: But, as more recent […]
...moreThese are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the importance of weather in the works of Kathryn Schulz, Anthony Doerr, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
...moreFor the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz analyzes “meteorological activity in fiction,” and how recent questions about climate change has led to a reemergence of weather related fiction, particularly in dystopian works: Our earliest stories about the weather concerned beginnings and endings. What emerged from the cold and darkness of the void will return to it; waters that […]
...moreOver at the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz takes aim at beloved transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau for being a humorless hypocrite, abstinence booster, and uninformed impugner of innocent jam-makers: The man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic […]
...moreFor the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz profiles Nell Zink, touching on her love for birds, her complicated relationship with the publishing industry, and her “improbable literary fame.”
...moreAs conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of punctuation, from Nabokov’s parenthetical “(picnic, lightning)” to the ellipses in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love […]
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