nonfiction
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This Week in Posivibes: A Wailing of a Town
Inspired by the books Please Kill Me and We Got the Neutron Bomb, Craig Ibarra began compiling the 70+ interviews that make up this self-declared oral history of San Pedro’s punk scene from 1977–1985. The book consists of these interviews, accounts from…
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A Life in Non-Fiction
I’ve always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had…
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Five Things About Ashley Ford
Blogger and writer Ashley Ford is profiled at the Indianapolis Star. She talks about her childhood in Indiana, writing a memoir, and more: We’re never going to see eye-to-eye on what’s OK to write about. I’m not trying to embarrass or hurt…
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Readymade Novels
According to Shaj Mathew, novelists are more and more approaching writing as conceptual art, creating “readymade” novels. You can read his take on the “Reality Hunger generation” over at The New Republic.
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How Soon Is Too Soon?
Leslie Jamison and Benjamin Moser tackle a long-debated question for the Bookends column: “Should There Be a Minimum Age for Writing a Memoir?”. They both agree there isn’t—you can read their reasoning over at the New York Times.
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Vivian Gornick Does Not Like Your MFA
Jessica Gross interviewed Vivian Gornick for Longreads and they talked money, death, sex, MFAs, and other things that bore Gornick: It’s meaningless to me. I found, as the years went on, I was very lucky not to have a bourgeois bone in…
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The Light of Sally Man
The Daily Beast interviews photographer Sally Mann about her new memoir and the overlap between writing and photography: Yes. They’re so fleeting but in both there is that raptus of inspiration. Fleeting and really hard to hold onto, and you…
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Larson
Bestselling author Erik Larson talks about his new book, Dead Wake, his transition from journalism to history, and what, in his opinion, makes a first-rate nonfiction novel.
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Spotlight: Will Moore’s “On Nonfiction”
“On Nonfiction” is an attempt to combine comics and the essay. It forms a part of Will Moore’s larger work-in-progress that includes, among other topics, meditations on pants, noises, friendship, and Miley Cyrus.
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Orson Welles’s Century
If we want to mistake success in Hollywood for a state of grace, then Welles is our Lucifer — the archangel closest to the Almighty whose beastly arrogance is to blame for whatever hell he woke up in. But what…
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Rolling in Carrion
Colin Dickey writes about death and its metaphors. Our dog has an insatiable curiosity and a love of these dead things. The time he dove into the wreck of a carcass that I could not even identify was the most…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman
Elliot Ackerman discusses his debut novel Green on Blue, fighting with the Marine Corps in the Second Battle of Fallujah, and being labeled as a journalist .