This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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...moreIndie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreIndie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...moreThe Guardian looks at how an Australian feminist bookstore took on MRA trolls. Two Dollar Radio, a Columbus-based independent publisher, plans to open a bookstore. A community bookstore in Amman, Jordan that charged a pay-what-you-can fee for books nearly went bankrupt, but was saved by crowdfunding from around the world.
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreBonnie Jo Campbell discusses her collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the natural world as a character, and finding writing from the male point of view easier.
...moreJessica Valenti discusses her memoir, Sex Object, how the experiences she touches on in her book shaped her, and how she discovered herself outside of those experiences.
...moreFor the office drones struggling to come back after the four-day weekend, take heart in James Livingston’s essay for Aeon considering whether work is necessary in our present age. Here at The Rumpus, Helen Betya Rubinstein expresses a sense of dislocation that’s familial and personal in the face of our newly reinforced election-cycle gender binary. For Vogue, […]
...moreHere at The Rumpus, this essay by Liz Latty on challenging the fairy tale myth of adoption is receiving a tremendous response from readers. Malloy Owen has written a mind-opening essay for The Point providing a valuable perspective that challenges liberals to reexamine liberalism. Many essays on the election results have expressed complete shock. Maurice Carlos Ruffin […]
...moreAt the Guardian, Zadie Smith writes about why dance is important for her and for her writing: The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it’s a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected—compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose—maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. […]
...moreYou may have missed Matt Groening and Lynda Barry in Sydney this past weekend, but never fear: over at the Guardian, you can still read about their lifelong friendship, which persists despite diverging paths. Groening is best known for The Simpsons, Barry for Ernie Pook’s Comeek; it all began at Evergreen College, where Matt Groening edited […]
...moreIf prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. Kate Kellaway interviews poet Anne Carson for the Guardian, touching on reliability, Oscar Wilde, and passing phases like boxing. Carson’s newest collection, Float, is now available, and she has just appeared in the newly launched Penguin Modern Poets Series.
...moreThe New Oxford Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-writer on all three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, reports Dalya Alberge for the Guardian. In other news, the Illuminati have bought the election and Buzz Aldrin has admitted the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax.
...moreVerlaine bought the 7mm six-shooter in Brussels on the morning of 10 July 1873, determined to put an end to a torrid two-year affair with his teenage lover. The gun Paul Verlaine used to wound fellow poet and lover, Arthur Rimbaud, is up for auction. The Guardian reports that the gun could sell for as […]
...moreThe United Nations is poised to name comic hero Wonder Woman an honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls at an October 21 event, Alison Flood reports for the Guardian. The occasion, which coincides with the character’s 75th anniversary, “will also mark the launch of the UN’s landmark global campaign supporting Sustainable Development Goal […]
...moreIn a modern world where hyper-connectivity often results in disconnection from our immediate surroundings, creating the space to explore poetry can make us more reflective and engaged citizens. Over at the Guardian, Rosie Spinks writes about how poetry can both express urban life, and make it more beautiful.
...moreA London bookshop is holding a contest for a lifetime supply of books for anyone in the world, according to a story by Alison Flood in the Guardian. Those who wish to enter simply have to tell Heywood Hill bookshop which book published in the past eighty years has been the most meaningful to them. The winner will be […]
...moreWithout editor Robert Gottlieb, contemporary classics such as True Grit and Catch-22 might not exist in the forms we know them—but that doesn’t seem to move him. In a rare interview for the Guardian, Michelle Dean visited Gottlieb at his New York home to talk about his long list of achievements, which he demurely brushes […]
...moreWhen Ottessa Moshfegh wrote the thriller Eileen, a novel recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she did it to get rich, reports Paul Laity for the Guardian: She didn’t want to “keep her head down” and “wait 30 years to be discovered … so I thought I’m going to do something bold. Because there are all […]
...moreAn anonymous writer at the Guardian has a second career in erotica to fund their academic lifestyle, despite mixed reactions from colleagues: Colleagues in the arts react with a strange mixture of nervous supportiveness and embarrassed indifference. If I bring up the subject (in private conversations off-campus, naturally), the conversation is swiftly curtailed. I don’t know if this is […]
...moreFor the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes of evidence showing earlier usages of phrases such as “wild goose chase” and “it’s Greek […]
...moreThe Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, has launched a campaign to save fifty words and phrases it deems are dying from lack of use, reports Alison Flood for the Guardian: Although language change is inevitable, it’s too bad to see some of our most colourful expressions going out of use,” said Joan Hall, former […]
...moreSworn haters of the word ‘moist,’ now is your chance to be heard. Oxford Dictionaries has launched a worldwide vote to find English language speakers’ least favorite word, the Guardian’s Alison Flood reported. Other top contenders include “no,” “like,” and “phlegm.”
...moreWriting for the Guardian, novelist Val McDermid disputes the recent study which suggests that “literary” fiction readers are more empathetic than “genre” readers: There is no doubt that, historically, there was a valid distinction. Nobody would attempt to suggest that there is an equivalence between Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf. (Let’s face it, Woolf couldn’t plot for toffee.) […]
...moreWhy is Catch-22 so widely read? According to the Guardian’s Sam Jordison, Joseph Heller’s novel is powerful because its protagonist Yossarian is “an old-fashioned hero”: Readers immediately cared about Yossarian, and his survival. Yossarian is the point of connection and understanding; a strong central fulcrum around which the chaos of the novel spins. He’s also that universally appealing […]
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