This Week in (Reproductive Rights) Essays
Our storytelling, the sharing of our necessary truths, is needed now more than ever.
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Posts Tagged: The New Republic
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome 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 […]
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Sound & Vision: Mark Alan Stamaty
Allyson McCabe talks with Mark Alan Stamaty, a Society of Illustrators four-time medalist, and the author-illustrator of ten books.
...moreEngdahl’s Game
Another year, another Nobel Prize in Literature not given to Don DeLillo. At The New Republic, Alex Shephard argues that DeLillo should have been a contender: …of all the leading American Nobel candidates, DeLillo is a writer of the moment. In an essay published three months after the September 11 attacks, Don DeLillo wrote that the problem […]
...more“Fruitful Bewilderment”
At The New Republic, Sarah Ruhl elicits thoughts and impromptu poems from poet Max Ritvo on spirituality, performance comedy, and “Fruitful Bewilderment.” On spirituality, Ritvo says, “The first time I heard Schubert’s Agnus Dei at a Mass, it made me feel like my forehead had never belonged anywhere, but suddenly knew that it was right where […]
...moreStay Classy
At The New Republic, Malcolm Harris reviews Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction book about his stint as a substitute teacher in Maine: Maintaining classroom discipline is not high on his list of priorities, and Baker is surprised at the level of control he’s expected to exercise. “How could they do it?” he wonders on day 15, “How […]
...moreTo Make Good Art from Bad Things
Gay Talese’s new book The Voyeur’s Motel has garnered some well-earned bad press after its source was discredited. But was it any good? For The New Republic, Alexandra Molotkow argues that to be worth reading, Talese would have had to offer some measure of reflection: Journalistic ethics are less important than ethics.
...moreWriting to Legitimize the Self
To research her book Without You, There Is No Us, Suki Kim worked undercover as an ESL teacher in North Korea. Kim was reluctant to call the work a memoir, believing that to do so “trivialized” her investigative reporting. The result was a backlash from critics, who called her undercover methods “dishonest.” At The New Republic, Kim responds to her critics: Here […]
...moreThe Hope Whose Death It Announces
Poetry is defined by a failure to live up to the hype it generates, promising divine transcendence through a medium that is essentially human. This is the paradox Ben Lerner articulates in his dissertation on The Hatred of Poetry. At The New Republic, Ken Chen doesn’t buy it: You get the sense Lerner’s intellectualized peevishness […]
...moreVoices Speaking Rather Than Words Written
Simply put, there is no theory without struggle. Struggle is the condition of possibility for theory. And struggle is produced by workers themselves. At The New Republic, Rachel Kushner introduces the newly translated 1971 Italian novel We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini, which takes place during a period of rapid industrialization in Northern Italy during the late […]
...moreOn Keeping a Bullet Journal
Several bullet journal gurus in that community have built significant online followings by posting photos of their hypnotically beautiful notebook spreads. “It’s pretty insane, I initially started posting photos of my journal on Instagram just to archive my process, and then I started racking up followers,” said graphic designer Ursula Hudson, who has been keeping […]
...moreEndued with Vital Warmth
Over at The New Republic, Francine Prose writes about Frankenstein’s conception, as a bet in a drama-fueled writer’s group, as fueled by a young soon-to-be-mother’s anxiety, as a cleverly-plotted Gothic novel, as stories embedded in stories, as something altogether wonderful and shot through with dark.
...moreThe Sacred and the Profane in Knausgaard
Is it possible to separate Knausgaard the author from Knausgaard the protagonist? At the New Republic, Tess Crain asks this question, taking a look at the series from a woman’s point of view. By her estimation, Volume 5, just out in English, explains some of Knausgaard’s problematic views on women by framing him as “a […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Independent bookstores are thriving because many are adapting technology and learning how to better serve their local community. A stunning new bookstore has opened in eastern China with dazzling displays and whimsical architecture. Bookstores in Barcelona are adapting as Spain deals with a shrinking economy. The New Republic takes a look at how a bookstore […]
...moreThe Butterfly Effect
At The New Republic, Laura Marsh examines the interplay—or lack thereof—between Nabokov’s identities as a writer and a lepidopterist. In her investigative and detailed cataloguing of scientific and literary happenings, her only steadfast finding may be this: “There’s a special sense in which all of this activity, however unenlightening, is essentially Nabokovian.”
...moreThere Is No Such Thing as the Ugly Cry
Rachel Vorona Cote writes about the aesthetics of crying for The New Republic: To cry this way—vigorously, heartily, vulgarly—reveals vulnerability at the same time that it conveys physical might and mettle. Our bodies can speak for themselves, says the ugly cry. Women do not exist merely through representation; we are neither watercolor nor clay. For […]
...moreBetter Late
Inspiration is a fickle mistress—sometimes the Muse doesn’t show up for years. Louis Begley may have gotten a late start, but after beginning his first novel at age fifty-six, he hasn’t stopped writing. The author reflects on his career for The New Republic: Without having set out to do so, I seem to have grown […]
...moreBefore Virginia Woolf, There Was Lola Ridge
At The New Republic, Terese Svoboda discusses “the forgotten feminism of Lola Ridge,” a radical poet who she says paved the way for feminist writers like Woolf with her 1919 speech “Women and Creative Will.”
...moreSarah Palin, the Transcendentalist
From Lincoln’s famous love of quoting Shakespeare to George Bush’s prodigious reading habits, American politics have always mingled with the literary pantheon. Now that Sarah Palin is back in the news for her endorsement of Donald Trump, Jeet Heer traces her literary roots to Walt Whitman: This is democratic verse, that tries to encompass the […]
...moreBeer and Books
Is the much loved bookseller Barnes & Noble turning into a nightclub? Not quite, but it is exploring the possibility of serving alcohol. The bookseller will be testing the sale of beer and wine at events in West Hartford before expanding the service into other stores. Although Barnes & Noble is not the first bookseller […]
...moreThe Science of Sentimentality
Based on the available evidence, if you want to write one of the fifty most important novels in the next half-century, then by all means avoid sentimental language. But if you want to get published, sell books, be reviewed, win a prize or simply make someone happy, then emote away and just write a good […]
...moreOdes to Lolita, the Sexuagenarian
It was like being marched through someone’s private idea of a perfect night, a night where I was the center but one that had curiously little to do with me at all—all of which is to say that in an equation of desire, the object of desire can be integral and incidental at the same […]
...moreIs Writing Art or Profession?
For those who start within the establishment, professional writing is likely to correspond to drudgery, and they’ll seek to escape it. For those on the outside looking in, it’s a mark of legitimacy. The reasons behind why writers write is arguably broken into two camps: for art and as a profession. Certainly neither is more […]
...moreTaking Students Seriously
Roxane Gay, over at The New Republic, on student activism: In the protests at Mizzou and Yale and elsewhere, students have made it clear that the status quo is unbearable. Whether we agree with these student protesters or not, we should be listening: They are articulating a vision for a better future, one that cannot […]
...moreA Language By Any Other Name
“Conlang” is short for “constructed language,” which is just what it sounds like: a language that has been constructed… conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for the entertainment of others. From J. R. R. Tolkien to Esperanto and Game of Thrones, […]
...moreHumpty Dumpty, the Original Mansplainer
I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented yet. No, that’s not the obnoxious guy from your Wallace Stevens seminar—that’s Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, explaining “Jabberwocky” to Alice. Let Evan Kindley take you down the rabbit hole of literary annotation over at The New Republic—and for […]
...moreThe Academic as (Insufferable) Hero
Cagey and brainy, Bellow wanted to be the novelist of both the streets and the faculty lounge. Alas, in too much of his work, he serves as a cautionary tale of how schools can open minds but can also sometimes trap the soul. Jeet Heer, over at The New Republic, offers us a profile of […]
...moreCheaters Sometimes Win
While the poetry world continues to grapple with the Best American Poetry controversy, perhaps its worth considering why anyone would try to game the system. Theodore Ross over at The New Republic explains how cheating is one of the best ways of getting published. He confesses to his own misdeeds, including ignoring submission guidelines and […]
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