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.
A Jump in Stature
Lilly Dancyger Is Rethinking the Ethics of Memoir
"I do think that we, as writers, owe things to the people in our lives that we care about."
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Against ‘Latin American Literature’
The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double-bind.
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What Millions Readers Are Reading (Vol. 1)
We asked about the books you're currently reading. You answered.
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Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In
"It was hard on many levels, and I had to keep going back to why I was writing in the first place."
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“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts”:
Valeria Luiselli on Juan Rulfo
"Rulfo travels in time and space with an absolute freedom without us getting lost."
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