Exceptional Pain and Power: Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
See how visceral? Before I opened this book, I felt I was already inside it.
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Posts Tagged: the new york times
Barbara Berman’s 2019 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman’s 2019 Poetry Shout-Out!
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A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith discusses her new collection Good Bones, how motherhood has changed her writing, and what it felt like to have a poem go viral.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
...moreExperiencing FoST Fest
“We are creating a unique story world,” said Charles Melcher, the festival’s founder. “Our tag line is ‘All the world’s a stage, come be a player,’ and this is the ultimate expression of that sentiment.” In an article for the New York Times, Julie Satow writes about the first-ever Future of StoryTelling Festival (aka FoST […]
...more“A Return to the Pleasures of Critical Discourse”
“Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith, and the occasional sign of progress,” writes Daphne Merkin, in The New York Times, of n+1 co-founder Mark Greif’s essay collection, Against Everything. On subjects as diverse Thoreau, exercise, “foodieism,” and the Octomom, Greif’s eye is […]
...moreLovecraft’s Hometown
To know Lovecraft turns out to be a way to know a great deal about the city [of Providence]. Still weird, and mostly architecturally unchanged since the early 1900s, Providence was H.P. Lovecraft’s stomping ground and muse. Noel Rubinton takes a literary walking tour of the horror/sci-fi master’s haunts for the New York Times, including […]
...moreOffice Space, the Final Frontier
In A.O. Scott’s eyes, summer blockbusters and workplace sitcoms aren’t that different these days: Part of what makes work tolerable is the idea that it is heroic, the fantasy that repetitive and meaningless tasks are charged with risk and significance. Pecking away at our keyboards, we’re cowboys, warriors, superheroes. But meanwhile, superheroics look like every […]
...moreNot a Healer
I thought, why not write the book that really scares you? At the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler talks with Colson Whitehead about his new book, The Underground Railroad, which features the underground railroad literalized as a railroad, underground.
...moreMercury Plummeting
For the New York Times, Marisa Silver reviews Jenni Fagan’s new novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, which takes place in a scarily plausible world in which ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the average temperature is well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Fagan uses the novel to explore not only the very realistic effects that […]
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The Upper Far East
So much for the ‘glamour’ of selling pretty things to pretty people.
...moreArt as Moral Privilege
For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral responsibility of art. She posits that “there is a way in which art for art’s sake is the art most open to all comers, and most […]
...moreKaraoke for a Cause
The New York Times writes about how Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, overcame her fear of singing in public to raise money for a nonprofit that helps orphans in Nepal. Gilbert recalls: I said to myself, “You’re not allowed to [be afraid] anymore. You spend your life telling people they have to take […]
...moreAll Girls All the Time
There have been an awful lot of girls in titles lately—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, to name a few—writes Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. But popular, formulaic titles aside, some “girl” books worth a deeper look this season include The Girls, by Emma Cline, and Megan […]
...moreGet ‘Em While They’re Young
This year’s children’s literature has some exceptional bonafides. Over the next few months, a number of acclaimed novelists, including Jane Smiley and Elena Ferrante, will be publishing children’s books. Whether a five-year-old can distinguish between literary and genre fiction, only time will tell.
...moreMapping the Brain
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley published a new study about brain activity in people listening to podcasts, the New York Times reported. “Using novel computational methods, the group broke down the stories into units of meaning: social elements, for example, like friends and parties, as well as locations and emotions. They found that […]
...moreThe Cool Future
“All plots tend to move deathward,” the narrator of “White Noise” says. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as […]
...moreRemaking Jane Austen
At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter interviews Curtis Sittenfield, author of a modern re-write of Pride and Prejudice, on why she decided to tackle the famous novel, and more: The novel has already proved polarizing among Austen fans. “Sadly disappointing, this book is just trying to cash in on the popularity of Austen’s characters,” one angry […]
...moreThe Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
...moreDylanology
Several of Bob Dylan’s old journals, in which he painstakingly drafted the lyrics of some of his classic songs, are set to reside at the University of Tulsa for future study. Tulsa is also home to the collected papers of Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s biggest early influences.
...moreChina Bans Foreigners from Publishing Online
China has issued a ban on foreign-owned media from publishing online within the nation. Global news agencies like Reuters, Dow Jones, the New York Times, and Bloomberg have invested considerable sums in building bureaus in the country. The foreign media ban is another step in reversing the nation’s loosening of censorship laws. This, along with the disappearance […]
...moreComing of Age
The publication of Go Set a Watchman may have cast Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in a new light, but the high school classic and its author will forever occupy an essential spot in the American literary canon. Michiko Kakutani remembers Lee’s work for the Times: Ms. Lee’s two novels both concern the loss […]
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Conversations with Writers Braver than Me: Anne Roiphe
Anne Roiphe on respecting writers’ freedom to express the truth of their experiences, while also respecting their subjects’ prerogative to shun them for it.
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The Big Idea: Mark Bittman
Suzanne Koven talks to food journalist, author, and activist Mark Bittman about his “Big Idea”—how food has changed in the last fifty years, and how to teach our children to eat better.
...moreThe Day Jobs That Influence Our Writing
At the New York Times, writers Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison explain how their past jobs—at a morgue and in kitchens—have taught them about writing: But it was another truth — the humility of that kitchen, confronting what I didn’t know — that has felt most resonant across my writing life. As my work has […]
...moreTime Travel in the Antarctic
In the latest installment of the New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review, Caroline Alexander writes an elegant review of Rebecca Hunt’s Everland, a novel about two expeditions in the Antarctic that take place more than a century apart: Her careful control of the narratives and dramatic pacing keeps the tension in each story steadily escalating. […]
...moreAndroidish Spy Paraphernalia
The New York Times brought together two distinctly imaginative authors, George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, for a chat on writing the future, their famously fabulist impulses, and the core of why we turn to literature at all.
...morePoetry’s Love Affair with the Internet
We already knew that the Internet is a wild and wonderful place for poets, but the web is also empowering verse offline. The New York Times reports on how the Internet is vaulting poetry onto the bestseller list, and we are thrilled to hear it.
...moreMothers, Tell Your Daughters Makes a Splash
Writing about the same river culture that Bonnie Jo Campbell once discussed with The Rumpus, the New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review called Mothers, Tell Your Daughters “watchful and viscerally alive” with a “spirit of indomitability.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: On Madness and Mad Men
In my eight years as a Mad Men fan, the series has repeatedly prompted me to reflect on parenting.
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