Posts Tagged: the American Reader

Reality Scooped: Talking with Tony Tulathimutte

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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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Appropriating Rural Poverty

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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 ways, even more insidious than their progenitors’, since they incorporate the countryside’s decline into the […]

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Two Sides to Some Stories

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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 Reader, Eric Dean Wilson traces the history and sings the praises of the diptych, or […]

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Memory Loss

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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 engines, perfect recall is no longer prized—just remember a couple key search terms and we’re […]

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“So Are You Helpless, Tragic, or Stupid?”

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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 the American Reader, Veselka pulls back for a more analytical take on the subject of road […]

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