Mark Jacobson wades through the history and fan theories concerning Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in an effort to uncover the film’s true meaning. For what it’s worth, this explanation of the flick has always hurt my head the most.
What Does The Shining Mean?
Stories in Verse
In 2010, the poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Bangladesh to speak with the survivors of the 1971 Liberation War. Eventually, she wrote a poetry collection about those interviews, which went on to win the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. At The Paris Review Daily, Sean Carman interviews Faizullah.
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The Platonic Library
The Guardian has an excerpt of My Ideal Bookshelf, with pieces by Judd Apatow, David Sedaris and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, available for viewing on its website. Take a guess which one said Raymond Carver makes writing fiction look easy.
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Commitments
“In the morning, before we left, we presented my aunt with a gift from Indonesia, a package of luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. Civet coffee? she said, bemused. We were already savoring cups of coffee at her table, brewed in her coffee press from Arabica beans of her own supply.” An excerpt from Year in Reading alumnus Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forthcoming novel appears in the new issue of Ploughshares.
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The Fitzgeralds in Comic Form
This is the best comic about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald you’ll read all day, I promise.
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The Casual Vacancy Adaptation
Although we won’t see Hogwarts on screen again, another J.K. Rowling fictional world will be on your TV soon. HBO and BBC are adapting her novel The Casual Vacancy into a three-hour miniseries.
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Thunder Thighs
Recommended Reading: This important essay from Gayle Branedis at The Rumpus on our cultural obsession with women’s thighs.
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Feel the Tingle?
Recommended Reading: On Chuck Tingle, self-published writer of gay erotica, who beat the notorious Sad Puppies at their own game: “Question: If you could pick a single writer to make an effective, compassionate statement about identity politics to a divided literary community, who would you pick? Would it be a schizophrenic, autistic person who’d authored an e-book called Space Raptor Butt Invasion?”
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The Worst Dinner Party
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