Los Angeles Times
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Fidel Castro: The Playboy Comandante
The comandante produced ideological fantasies on a mass scale within the context of the Cold War which led to an exotic, sexy, and happy vision of Cuba.
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Home-Turned-Library Brings Japanese Literature to Community
For the Los Angeles Times, Kelly Corrigan spoke with Mitsuko Roberts of Glendale, California about The Okanoue Library, a collection of over 700 works of Japanese literature, film, and other media donated by Glendale’s Japanese community. Roberts hosts this collection a few…
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Writing Truth
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Colin Dickey explores the idea of the contemporary American essay as a vehicle for truth. Citing essayists such as John D’Agata, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, Dickey writes: How do you know…
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Doors to Other Possibilities
I think what has brought imaginative fiction, imaginative literature, back into central centrality is that so much of it is very good, and so much of it is kind of needed because of the fact that it sort of opens…
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Time is Not on Your Side
Mick Jagger stands for every baby boomer, the generation that refused to grow up. Nothing makes you feel older than watching rock stars grow old. Rich Cohen offers this milepost at the Los Angeles Times to mark Mick Jagger’s journey beyond…
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Two Bangladeshi Writers Murdered
Two secular journalists in Bangladesh were murdered recently, and these are far from the first incidents: These are only the latest in a recent string of killings of writers and journalists in Bangladesh. In a searing editorial Monday, the Dhaka…
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One of the Crowd
12,000 members of the literary community/industry gathered in LA for AWP last week. Viet Thanh Nguyen considers the writer’s sometimes conflicting needs for audience, privacy, and the tribe. He writes of his own process preparing for a readership, “The constant reworking…
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Paper, Please
A study of 300 college students in the United States, Germany, Slovakia, and Japan found that 92 percent preferred to read paper books over e-books. The students preferred paper because of the “lack of distractions that are available on computers…
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Looking into the Future
“What will happen in 2016 in books?” the Los Angeles Times asks in a recent article. And it offers a few predictions: 2016 will be the year of print books, science fiction, and independent presses, among other trends.
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On Writing For Old White Men
At the LA Times, Claire Vaye Watkins recounts her realization that she has been writing to appeal to the white male literary establishment: I am trying to write something urgent, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying…
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Joyce Carol Oates Riles Twitter
A few days ago, Joyce Carol Oates mused about the media’s coverage of ISIS with a tweet that sparked an intense debate. All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query…
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Quoting Cheryl Strayed
And now I look back and think I’m so glad that I was brave enough to break my own heart—and I wish that I had been braver sooner because maybe I would have broken his a little less. Over at…