Lit Hub
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Pulling the Strings of Coincidence
Coincidence often gives fiction its chance to mean something. Over at Lit Hub, in an excerpt from her new book The Kite and the String, Alice Mattison walks us through brilliantly executed coincidences in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, Flannery O’Connor’s story…
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How a Poet Tackles Today’s Violence
I’ll start again by telling you that this is a body. A body that bears the weight of its makers. A body that’s trying to tell a story, without making it pretty, but this is perhaps where poetry fails me,…
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Barbizon Revisited
For Lit Hub, Nathan Hill takes us through the history of the Barbizon Hotel, recounting its role as an incubator for young women writers of the mid-20th century and as a landmark for those same writers to touch upon and…
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How to Write about the Disabled
Do not assume that empathy equals experience. Writing outside your personal experience is always a tricky thing, and writing about disabled people when you yourself are not disabled is an especially difficult thing to do. At Lit Hub, Nicola Griffith has…
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Appreciating Silence
We can best discern how loud our lives feel in the moments when we try to discipline both real and virtual decibels. As life becomes more modern with ever-advancing technology, noise builds and builds to the point where silence is…
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The Fire Every Time
“Will the world my pains deride forever?” At Lit Hub, Precious Rasheeda Muhammad traces the lineage of black protest writing from W.E.B. De Bois to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Kendrick Lamar: how the layers of subtext in each iteration work to…
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The Literary Value of Bodybuilding
With the pinnacle of human physical achievement on full display at the Summer Olympics, enjoy this article about writing literature about the ins and outs of bodybuilding.
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Remembering Killed-Off Characters
In an epic confessional letter at Lit Hub, author Stuart Nadler mourns all the characters he’s abandoned, maimed, and murdered for the sake of the grueling writing process. These lost creations and their universes live on in his memories and drafts…
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Outside the Lit Community, Looking In
Most writers, especially those who are just starting out, feel lost and lonely in a literary world that seems to have pre-constructed cliques that are so hard to infiltrate. Anne Korkeakivi, an ex-pat and ever-traveling author with literary connections spread…
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You Are Here
Nabokov understood the seduction of maps as a way of ordering the fantastic, the disorderly, the sometimes contradictory nature of description, a visual aid to the internal eye. For Lit Hub, Susan Daitch gives a sweeping textual overview of the…
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Puzzling over Plagiarism
With the recent presidential election utilizing such unapologetic plagiarism, one wonders just what goes on in the minds of anyone who so confidently uses others’ words as their own. Marina Budhos meditates on this issue as she details the shocking moment…
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Conceptualizing the Vagina
At Lit Hub, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares an excerpt of her new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, exploring the cultural understandings and depictions of female genitalia from Shakespeare’s “No thing” to Jamie McCartney’s The…