Lit Hub
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Teaching the Diaries of the Holocaust
Alexandra Zapruder writes for Lit Hub on her two decades of work collecting diaries written by teenagers and young adults during the Holocaust, as well as teaching about the wide variety of experiences captured in those diaries.
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On Being Both an Editor and Writer
At Lit Hub, editor and author Jill Bialosky examines the ways in which writing and editing work themselves out in her mind. She writes in the early morning, before tackling anything else, and then goes to work critiquing the work of other…
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A Literary Q&A, Literally
I’m not interested in poems that simply narrate or enact a performance of a life while the reader watches. It’s important that the work feel distilled and transformed. Poems that are elliptical or take a sidelong approach are more compelling,…
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Got to Pg. 359 and Stopped Reading
So why has Infinite Jest, supposedly such an influential novel, become a paper weight, a talking point, a bench-mark of high- and low-brow intellectuality? Why has no one (or, more accurately, why does everyone think that no one) has actually…
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Lolita Landmarks
Over at Lit Hub, Rebecca Brill has traced Lolita’s 62 years of history “from transgressive lit to pop iconography,” from inception to Kubrick to Lana Del Ray’s obsession on Born to Die. Maybe we’re just a little closer to understanding the…
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The Kind of Madness That Is Passion
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with herself. Maybe never. It was always her–with others, and in these others she was reflected and the others were reflected in her. Nothing was–was pure, she thought without understanding what…
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By Bukowski’s Rules
On Writing, a new collection of musings on the writing life by Charles Bukowski, is coming out on August 27th from HarperCollins. In the meantime, you can head over to Lit Hub to find a preview of the book disclosing the master’s…
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The Perfect Pen(cil)
Over at Lit Hub, Michele Filgate polled a wide range of writers (from Margaret Atwood to Maggie Nelson to Bhanu Kapil) about their favorite writing instruments, asking them to talk about the nostalgia attached to them and the sensations of that…
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To All the Novels that Will Never Be Published
There are the sparkling debut novels that become runaway successes; those are few and far between. Then there are the clumsy first novels that get published—good, but primarily a raw first effort on a long and torturous path to becoming…
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Literary Life in Los Angeles Today
We are not just an entertainment industry city; there are artists and engineers and teachers and restaurateurs and civil servants and so many more people in the city who want more than to build a perfect body and network with…
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On the Right to Write in the Present
When I move from first to third person, or second, if I keep the present tense, it is not because what happens is somehow cinematic to me—it is perhaps closer to say that cinema most resembles what that looks like.…
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Making Room on the Shelf
Women writers, like women activists, have always done a considerable amount of the intellectual heavy lifting required for innovation. And yet try to find many of these women in bookstores: Kay Boyle, Grace Paley, Janet Flanner, Laurie Colwin, Meredith Tax,…