the American Reader
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Reality Scooped: Talking with Tony Tulathimutte
Recent Whiting Award winner Tony Tulathimutte discusses his first novel, Private Citizens, the state of satire in 2017, “booby-trapping” identity politics, and productivity in the Internet age.
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Shots in the Dark
For The American Reader, Adrian Van Young examines the pervasiveness of gun violence in fiction and how it relates to the brutality of the real world.
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Appropriating Rural Poverty
We’re living in a golden decade for rural escapist fare: the latest, most extreme iteration of a cultural construct that effectively removes people living there from society’s list of concerns. The effect of these savvy new Westerns is, in some…
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Two Sides to Some Stories
Because we’re not expecting it, because the diptych hasn’t yet become a tired form in narrative, I think the diptych challenges and transforms traditional narrative, that is, story built around the arc of beginning, middle, and end. For The American…
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The Power of Print
As reported a week or so ago by Joe Pompeo at Capital, The American Reader plans to abandon its digital platform and turn all of its focus toward print.
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A Puzzling Gender Gap
When I was twenty, I submitted a puzzle that [Will Shortz] rejected. He cited MALE GAZE among the entries he found unworthy of publication. I don’t doubt that a woman or a younger editor might have deemed that entry an…
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The Life and Death of Twerk
The American Reader has a new series examining the lifespan of American slang. In the first installment, Michael Reid Roberts looks at the history of “shade” and “twerk.”
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Memory Loss
These days, memorization, like corporal punishment, is something our culture has largely evolved beyond. We might all know the first verse of Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but beyond that it’s hit and miss. In the age of search…
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Read (and listen to) Long Meadow!
Artist/Poet Jon Cotner has a poem, “Long Meadow,” over at The American Reader. Not only can you read this amazing poem but it has audio! I still have yet to adjust to North American life I can’t say exactly when…
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“So Are You Helpless, Tragic, or Stupid?”
You may remember, from when it was featured on Longform.org, Vanessa Veselka’s GQ essay “The Truck Stop Killer,” about her life as a teenage hitchhiker and her narrow escape from a man who might have been a serial killer. Now, for…