Lit Hub
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To Cheat or Not to Cheat
Life coach, Rumpus columnist, and novelist Rick Moody lends his ear to those at the crossroads of love over at Lit Hub. This week, he addresses the unfaithful: And: what we’re talking about, here, really, is intimacy. In order for someone in…
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Publishing’s Culture of Positive
Recently, Jessa Crispin shocked the literary world by announcing she would be closing Bookslut, the literary blog she started fourteen years ago. Since then she has stirred some controversy, calling the Paris Review “boring as fuck” (the Paris Review took…
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The Forgotten Women Writers of the 19th Century
Over at Lit Hub, Anne Boyd Rioux discusses the literary genius of the 19-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the American tradition of “the diminution of women writers” that continues today: Woolson’s literary star faded quickly after her death in…
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The Case for Including More Female Scientists in Literature
If female characters are restricted to the roles of artist, dancer, waitress, or barista, their potential to generate fiction that explores existentially rich and original worlds also seems restricted. In the ongoing discussion of groups in sore need of better…
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Measuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA…
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False Dichotomy
Can women really have it all? Like, all of it? But how could they possibly have multiple things at the same time? How can they even think human thoughts after they’ve subsumed their corporeal selves into an all-encompassing prison of…
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Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have…
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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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The Lives of Others
We’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when…
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Mapping Munro
Who else can write a story like that? Over at Lit Hub, Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us as Breathing, writes about her formative years as a writer: diagramming Alice Munro short stories to get a better sense…
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Learning from Sylvia Plath’s Thesis
I kept Plath’s “Magic Mirror” close by as I wrote my own thesis. This knowledge that someone else—a literary titan who had seen me through my own breakdown—had attempted a similar project, using a proxy form to interrogate a personal…
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Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
This past weekend, thousands of people convened to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Elizabethan bard’s formal innovations are widely revered as some of the most influential literary developments in history, so much so that we almost overlook…