Places Where Art is Made
We often look to metaphor for guidance in our constant search for the how and why of writing. In an essay at The Millions comparing writing to running, Nick Ripatrazone explains…
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Nick Ripatrazone
31 posts
Teaching Pynchon
At its worst, Pynchon’s prose is a beautiful failure. At its best, Pynchon’s prose is revelatory. Nick Ripatrazone, writing for The Millions, talks about what makes it so hard to…
Literary Duets
At The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone reviews BOMB Magazine’s “The Author Interviews,” “a collection of 35 interviews spanning 30 years.” He meditates on the competing definitions and modes, concluding he is “drawn”…
Rotating Writing 90 Degrees
At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook.…
This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Aqueous Books released From Here, Jen Michalski’s second short story collection and fourth book. The founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww and a long-time Baltimore resident, Michalski’s…
The Devil Finds Work
Combining The Exorcist, New Jersey, and James Baldwin, among other things, Nick Ripatrazone reviews William Giraldi’s new novel, Hold the Dark, at The Millions. He contemplates Giraldi’s place in contemporary…
Rising to Literature’s Bait
From Ernest Hemingway to Richard Brautigan and Jim Harrison, fishing and literature has always had a strong, mysterious link. Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone goes deep into this ancient…
Creative Writing’s Business
Rumpus contributor Nick Ripatrazone writes about teaching students the business side of creative writing at The Millions, addressing some crucial questions: Should a writer submit to a literary magazine that…
The Saddest Poem Ever Written
A lot of poems are sad, but over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone thinks he’s found the saddest: “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ripatrazone explores Hopkins’s poem, and…
Flannery O’Connor Can’t Be Tamed
This quote from Paul Lisicky in an essay at The Millions neatly sums up why it can be so difficult to teach Flannery O’Connor’s work: …it’s so easy to simplify…
Searching for Rafters in the Dark
If sentimentality is a sin, it is only because feeling can be so beautiful. One moment of sentiment in literature is worth a thousand failures. We often cannot see the…