NPR
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Novelist Brings Slavery to California
In an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man…
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A Family of Charm, Wolves, and Turnips
Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal tales whose concerns are eternal, and to…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Leave it to The Toast to give us a story told by a mermaid as opposed to a story about one. And leave it to The Toast to find a very good mermaid storyteller indeed. On Wednesday, they released “Mermaids at…
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What Gender Means
The Marvel universe is about to get a much-needed dose of perspective when G. Willow Wilson’s all-female team of Avengers arrives this May. NPR talked to Wilson about gender, identity, and ladies who draw: If we’re going to have an…
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Stories That Must Be Told
To read Alejandro Zambra is to engage with someone who writes as though the burden of history were upon him and no one else — the history of his country of Chile, of literature, and of humanity’s shared experience. You…
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This Week in Short Fiction
It’s only February, but 2015 is already proving to be a treasure trove of big happenings in the world of short stories. Take this past Tuesday, when Kelly Link, Charles Baxter, and Neil Gaiman all released new collections, undoubtedly making the…
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Polar Poetry
Jynne Dilling Martin’s new collection of poems, We Mammals in Hospitable Times, was written in large part through a grant from the National Science Foundation, which sent the poet to the far reaches of Antarctica to shadow scientists and soak…
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Digitizing Reels of History
The British Library says it has a window of 15 years to preserve an invaluable cache of sound recordings, but unless fundraising can help pick up the pace, the archives could take as many as 48 to complete. The artifacts…
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Hacking Away at Old Saws
In an interview with NPR about his new book, It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches, Orin Hargraves acknowledges the utility of well-worn shorthand even as he counsels against its use. Clichés work because…
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Remembering Forgotten Women
I think there’s a lot of dissonance for women, where there’s how we want to live, and how we want to see ourselves, and then what our real circumstances are. And I think the more we can close that distance…
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The Lives and Deaths of Lit Mags
With the Canadian publication Descant announcing it will come to an end this month, Juan Vidal reflects on the state of literary magazines for NPR.