Roxane Gay rounded up some of her favorite writers from “Outside of New York City.” (And she’s not talking about Brooklyn.)
New York: It Isn’t All That
Reconstruction
Recommended Reading: On lyric essays and trauma at Ploughshares. “I didn’t start writing lyric essays until I found out I had cancer. The melanoma buried in my right cheek was at first missed, and then misdiagnosed in its severity. Clark’s stage IV, they told me. Likely in my lymph nodes, but they wouldn’t know until my third surgery, the excision and biopsy.”
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The Ultimate Sentence
“If one-sentence stories are as common as snowflakes, one-sentence novels are as rare as white ravens.” At The New Yorker, Brad Leithauser writes about the one-sentence novel or the point when the story builds to a particular sentence. To give you an example, here’s one of his favorites from Lolita: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.”
Hey, That’s My Thought!
“Why would a poet ever plagiarize? You’re not going to get famous, and you’re really not going to get rich.” Where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin? This piece at Electric Literature examines what happens when a poet steals a line.
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Sarah M. Broom on Unfinished Work
"The unfinished work is no less real, or necessary, or powerful than the book," Broom says in a recent Whiting Foundation speech.
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A Jump in Stature
Mark Twain first rose to fame as the author of an essay about a frog-jumping contest in California. Originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” the essay went viral in America’s biggest newspapers, eventually inspiring the New York Tribune to write of Twain that “no reputation was ever so rapidly won.” Yet the humor which made the essay so popular is often lost on modern audiences, in no small part because, as Ben Turnoff writes in Lapham’s Quarterly, frontier humor isn’t funny if there’s no Wild West.
Other Ventures
What’s it like being a young journalist in a turbulent time for the business? Some of my fellow Medill grads and I have created a blog to discuss that and other pressing matters. If you’re a journalism junkie like I am, you’ll enjoy The Newshole. Check it out.Longtime Millions contributor Emre has started a blog called Live from Gybria, where he will chronicle his travels, his life as a Turkish expat, and his studies at my illustrious alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism. Luckily, Emre will still be posting here, too. In fact, we’ll be putting up some more of his reading journals here in the next few days.And congrats to Anne Fernald (proprietor of the litblog Fernham) whose book Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader has just been published.