Trying Anything Else
The nineteen year old that I work with setting up the Hydration Stations on the Lakefront path told me that this was her second job ever and that she wanted to do really well because she saw a future with the company. I scoffed at her in exactly the
Telling the Fairytale: Explaining Hedgebrook to My Four-Year-Old Nephew
Growing up, I never knew it was possible to be a writer. No one in my family ever talked about reading books, never mind writing them. It wasn’t until September of my senior year in high school that I discovered that Barnes and Noble was a bookstore and not
This Is How You Lose Her
This Is How You Lose Her Junot Diaz Riverhead, September 2012 224 pages $26.95 Full disclosure: I heart Junot Diaz. A lot. I’m not alone, of course. His previous efforts, Drown and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, have attracted the kind of visceral praise
THAT LIT, LIT LIFE (with global characteristics) 6 (of 14)
Good morning. It’s a day for an air walk on that lit, lit sojourn. Coffee? Here’s the view above my tatami mat, one of Liu Zhen’s “Landscapes of the Mind,” a lacquer painting. Liu Zhen is a talented, and unusual, young (b. 1970) Shanghai-based artist. Unusual for his patience
Literary Boroughs #19: Kansas City, Missouri
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment
#GurneyEssay – The Trending Topic that will Topple Kitten Videos
I want to claim that I have invented a new form of essay. It’s easy and fun and with the uptrending in retirement age demographicals in the USA regionality, it might just become the dominant form of essay writing in the next decade. It’s possibilities for depressing content are
Sorry Please Thank You
Sorry Please Thank You Charles Yu Pantheon, July 2012 240 pages $24.95 Charles Yu is weird. It’s just one of those things you can tell after reading the stories from his most recent collection, Sorry Please Thank You. There’s a zombie shopping for a date, a floating door to
Blurbese: “The First _____”
When Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was published, in 2010, the British Daily Telegraph called it “the first great American novel of the post-Obama era.” If that sounds oddly specific (not to mention premature), they at least had good reason for it: the title of “first great American novel of the
THAT LIT, LIT LIFE (with global characteristics) 5 (of 14)
I used to live in Singapore. In ’94, just before my first book was released, a corporation moved me to this tropical, island city-state. It still feels like home whenever I fly into Changi at the eastern end of the island. Prison neighborhood. The street where I lived. My
Literary Boroughs #18: Nottingham, UK
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment