“My friend Kathy was a Mustang Ranch girl in the eighties, had a line on how to bring cocaine into town, and was party girl central and making a lot of money. She was in the center of it in a way that my characters can see but they can’t ever get to. Reno is a beautiful, beat up, and weird town devoted to this false notion of luck. It’s a beautiful place.” Talking with Christian Kiefer.
The Pathos of Reno
Serialized Storytelling
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Garth Greenwell on Being a Mystery to Yourself
Garth Greenwell discusses the narrator of his two novels, who repeatedly "undergoes a process of coming into self-knowledge."
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Mining and Mapping Life with Patricia Engel
Patricia Engel discusses her latest novel, Infinite Country, and how storytelling was instilled within her from an early age.
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“Against Explanation”
“I don’t know how to give more of myself than a poem. Every poem I write is more accurate than anything I can ever tweet about it: my interior life, and its struggle and desire to converse with the exterior world.” Tarfia Faizullah writes for Poetry‘s blog about why she doesn’t want to explain her poems, the power of breath, and the frustrating implications of the question, “did it happen to you?”
“Immaculate glass world of the spirit”
Recommended Reading: Anka Muhlstein on Stefan Zweig (whose work, you may have heard, inspired Wes Anderson’s latest film).
The Millennial Resurgence of Eve Babitz
For Buzzfeed Rachel Vorona Cote explores Eve Babitz and the white literary It Girl. “Readers, particularly literary women in their twenties and thirties, seem to be entranced by this child of Hollywood, who unabashedly relished her LA milieu and both chronicled and defended its paradoxes. But it’s still a milieu that flattens the city into one that is homogenous, wealthy, and white.” Pair with this essay about her novel Sex and Rage.
L.A. Times Book Prize Winners
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