This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: maria bustillos
The Role of the Critical Writer
For The Awl, Maria Bustillos sits down for lunch with writer Teju Cole in Bali, where Cole recently spoke at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The two discuss art, colonialism, and the role of the critical writer. Regarding the latter, Cole says: What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain […]
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Rumpus Video Premiere: The Size Queens’s To The Country
An exclusive video premiere of The Size Queens’s To the Country, a two-song sampler featuring the titular track, “To The Country,” along with “Hands and Knees.”
...more“In Praise of Editors”
All writers should go read every word of this essay by Maria Bustillos, written on the occasion of editor Carrie Frye’s departure from the Awl. The gist of it: your editor is your friend, not some censorious know-it-all trying to ruin your work. (Well, usually.) One of many perfect passages: …at its best there is […]
...moreThe Essay That Should End the Irony Wars
Irony can acknowledge our natural, justifiable feelings of insignificance, or show that we understand our subjectivity. With some humor, if we can manage it! Irony demonstrates that we know we are not the center of the universe, that we can hold opposing ideas in our heads. That we can find humor in the contrast between […]
...moreOn Romance Fiction
At The Awl, Maria Bustillos takes a closer look at romance novels, characterizing the genre as “underground writing,” while wondering what makes literature “trivial”? “There are distinct advantages in this poor-cousin status. Here is a literature entirely without pretense; its authors are guileless, since they needn’t conform to any external ideal of literary performance. They […]
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