Recommended Reading: Lindsay Whalen’s interview with Lev Grossman, which goes nicely with our review of The Magicians.
“My life when I was that age was such a disaster”
“Insatiable Maw”
"In recent decades the traditional outlets for individual short stories have dwindled, with literary magazines closing or shrinking. But the Internet has created an insatiable maw to feed." Why both the Internet and electronic devices might be good for the short story.
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Everything is Political
Recommended Reading: Amy King, Shane McCrae, Ken Chen, and fifteen other poets and activists on political poetry and literary activism.
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Joyce Carol Oates on Mourning and Writer as Persona
In the Atlantic's annual fiction supplement, Joyce Carol Oates writes about the loss of her husband of 48 years and the split identity of the well-known writer: "My job at the university is to impersonate 'Joyce Carol Oates' [...] this quasi-public self [...] is scarcely visible to me, as a mirror-reflection, seen up close, is scarcely visible to the viewer."
A Life’s Recipe
Just about every review of Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits calls attention to its “narrative virtuosity” and the way it “packs several genres into one.” That might sound like empty praise until you check out this excerpt for yourself, and see that the book is not only a memoir, and a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a cookbook.
Clarissa Explains It All
Recommended Reading: This piece by Adelle Waldman at The New Yorker on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson, "the man who made the modern novel."
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