“I was born in the lair of Romulus and Remus, Washington D.C.” And The Los Angeles Review of Book’s interview with the late Gore Vidal just gets better from there.
City On A Hill
Fiction by Allegra Goodman
Recommended reading: elderly sisters contend with the youngest dying, in a quietly wry new story by Allegra Goodman at the New Yorker. “She pretended to sleep, and then she really did drop off. When she woke, her sisters were hovering over her. Some of us have overstayed our welcome, Jeanne thought. And then, with sudden shock, No: I’m the one. That would be me.”
Familiar Ground
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On Reading and Re-Reading Autoportrait
When our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait, he wrote that the book compels you to keep reading because “the more Levé says, the more facts he sets down, the more you realize he hasn’t said.” But what if at the end, you’re meant to reread the book, too? Over at Words Without Borders, Jan Steyn says “the only way to get a better idea of how [these sentences] fit together is to keep reading, and reading, until the end, and then perhaps to read the book again.”
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Dada in the Dark
Having trouble sleeping? Take a hint from Charles Simic and consider reading Dadaist poetry.
Women in Comic Books
There’s been a lot of talk about women breaking into traditionally male fields and hobbies, but in a blog post at The Missouri Review Caitlin Rosberg laments the continued underrepresentation of female characters and creatives in comic books. She then explores the work she’s doing to improve the situation by publishing women writers and artists in works like the Ladies’ Night Anthology. As she says, “I’m motivated in no small part by being able to say to those ‘make your own’ strawmen, ‘I do. I’m an editor contributing to published comic books. Are you?'”
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