Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
Choking Hazard
Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
Where Every Novel Takes Place
Electric Literature has posted a “Map of the City Where Every Novel Takes Place,” so now you can know exactly how to get from Middlemarch to The Jungle Book via Jurassic Park.
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Authoring Change
The Boston Globe profiles Daniel Coquillette, co-author of the first comprehensive history of Harvard Law School. “Deeming the previous attempts lackluster, Coquillette and Bruce Kimball resolved to produce an honest, critical look at Harvard Law School’s founding — and its oftentimes bigoted history.” His book inspired students to take action to retire the school’s crest.
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Carl Köhler in Toronto
An exhibition of the authorportraits of Swedish artist Carl Köhler, whose extraordinary portraits of artists and intellectuals we’ve displayed here at The Millions, opens in Toronto on January 11th at the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto, 130 St. George St. For more information call 416-971-3131.
Checkmate, Beckett
How did the game of chess inform the work of Samuel Beckett? Stephen Moss investigates.
United Slang of America
(Interactive) Infographic of the Week: Slate’s United Slang of America. Click each state to find out more about the state-specific slang. You could also read our own Michael Bourne’s piece on, like, why the word like is really cool!
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I’m sorry but this is a terrible story. Good gosh. I thought Kleeman was supposed to represent the new avant garde. This is straight out of an undergrad fiction workshop. Plot, prose, characterization all tedious. Yet this will be the only piece of fiction many people read this week. Contemporary American lit has so much more to offer than this. Fiction can be inventive, funny, fun, emotionally resonant, edgy…alive…this has all the life of a last-minute high school English paper.
Yipes! Agreed. I’ve read a hundred pieces as time-wastingly “okay” (until that amateurish finish) as that, online, in the past year or so. Why is that particular not bad/not good thing in the NYer? I can only imagine a shrug in response.