Posts Tagged: slate

Just Doing It: A Conversation with Daniel Ortberg

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Mallory Ortberg discusses their new book, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, what it means to be a self-taught writer, and questioning gender.

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This Week in Essays

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When Sandra A. Miller’s sister gets cancer, the family looks to their similar sense of humor as a way to power through in an essay on Literal Latte. Here at The Rumpus, Leslie Jill Patterson looks at the unprecedented action on death row in Arkansas and the ways we try to reassure ourselves in matters of state-sanctioned […]

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This Week in Essays

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Last week was horrible and you need a laugh. Read Kate Washington’s imagined revolutionary National Parks meeting at McSweeney’s. For Longreads, Anjali Enjeti tackles her perceived outsider status, even as a first-generation American-born citizen. Read Davey Davis’s compelling dissection of the body horror genre here at The Rumpus.

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And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…

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Bob Dylan? At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel acknowledged that no one is quite sure how to feel about the news. At Slate, Stephen Metcalf praises Bob Dylan’s genius, but argues that he’s a musician, not a poet: The objection here hinges in the definition of the word literature. You wouldn’t give the literary prize to […]

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Child’s Play

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Not a day goes by that there isn’t some new study on how children’s brains work and what kind of media they should be consuming, With all the scientifically backed books out there now, it’s good to also have some children’s literature that’s still about introducing them to what stories can do. For Slate, Adrienne […]

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Kid’s Lit: Team Order or Team Nonsense?

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Children’s literature as a genre has grown exponentially from early morality-racked lesson books to modern goofy masterpieces such as Captain Underpants—how did we switch from Order to Nonsense, and have we completely switched over? At Slate, Katy Waldman sits down with literary critic and professor Seth Lerer to discuss the evolution of children’s literature and the […]

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Where Writers Rule

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At Slate, Laura Miller discusses the TV showrunner as novelist, focusing specifically on Noah Hawley. Hawley, showrunner for the FX show Fargo, has also published multiple novels, including Before the Fall: By contrast, the flawed, struggling, conflicted male characters in both seasons of Fargo register as real people, despite the darkly farcical tone the series takes […]

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Gimme Gimme JSTOR

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The question of access continues to plague the academic community—if academia is truly about knowledge and discovery, why are there still so many barriers to the unfettered sharing of information? The architects of digital “pirate libraries” around the world are trying to resolve that contradiction, violating copyright laws to bring expensive scholarly materials to the […]

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In Favor of Reading the Literary Canon

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The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. Responding to Yale students’ protesting the English department’s course requirements, Slate’s Katy Waldman argues that English majors should still have to read the “sexist, racist, colonialist, and totally gross” […]

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Naturally Emily Dickinson

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I became tantalized by the idea of a genius poet whose talent was nourished not by extensive travel, nor by formal literary training, but rather by an intimacy with the kinds of creatures Americans routinely encounter and rarely appreciate. For Slate, Ferris Jabr dives deep into the imagery of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to find new […]

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Let the Men Have Their Book Clubs

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Taking a different stance on the men-only book clubs that have everyone rolling their eyes, Slate’s L.V. Anderson argues that feminists should applaud men embracing an activity that has been so coded as feminine—and eagerly await the day when men do not feel like they have to declare their masculinity in order to do so: […]

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Lost Labor

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Certain ways of avoiding a childbirth scene in contemporary fiction have become almost predictable, as clichéd as the clothes scattered on the floor in a movie rated PG-13: the frantic car ride to the hospital, followed by a jump cut to the new baby; or the played-for-laughs episode of the laboring woman screaming at her […]

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No New Friends

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A connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why nobody writes memoirs about their friends, and then looks at two recent books that take […]

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Total Noise and Complete Saturation

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For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested, in a clinical way, in silence.

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Fan Fiction Gone Wild

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Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone. After the Guardian wrote about the suit, my own social media feeds filled up with […]

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Writing on Old Age

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For Slate, Laura Miller reviews the way old age is explored and rendered through literature, especially by those of old age themselves: The essays in Alive, Alive Oh! resolve in a stubbornly untidy fashion; Athill rejects the unspoken, oppressively conventional “wisdom” that dominates the personal essay today. “My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor […]

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