Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?

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At my job working the early morning Hydration Stations along the lakefront path serving Gatorade to Chicago-area runners, I work with a 19 year old who also works at the duty-free at the airport (she’s the one who looks at your ticket and tells you that you can’t shop

Bridging the Generation Gap: Grub Street Teens Visit Ploughshares

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This past summer, during Grub Street’s Young Adult Writers Teen Fellowship (http://www.grubstreet.org/index.php?id=22), one of my students wrote a ghazal that left me speechless with awe and envy. She is fifteen. Most days during the three-week program, she wore flannel shirts, jean shorts, and black Gladiator sandals. Her shoulder-length brown

The Listeners

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The Listeners Leni Zumas Tin House Books, May 2012 $15.95 352 pages Perhaps a lesser-known corollary to the Chekhov’s gun principle is this:  if there is an octopus on the cover of the book, it had better shoot ink by novel’s end.  In Leni Zumas’ The Listeners, however, it’s

THAT LIT, LIT LIFE (with global characteristics) 4 (of 14)

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Shades of pink at Café Gray’s bar where I met the omnipresent Nigel Collett for drinks. Nigel fits comfortably into my lit, lit life. For one thing, we’re contemporaries. As much as I love writing “this younger writer,” as I did last blog, it’s reassuring to bump into others on

Literary Boroughs #17: Great Falls, Montana

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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

Lost Classics: Equal Danger

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Equal Danger Leonardo Sciascia New York Review of Books Classics, October 2003 152 pages $14.00 [Editor’s note: Every few months, Akshay Ahuja will dig into the archives for an old book that has either fallen out of favor or never received the recognition it deserves. Feel free to add

How Much of Your Salary Would You Spend on a Book?

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Last year my husband, Adam Stumacher, and I moved to Guatemala so we could work on our novels. That was the plan. Our first week there, he worked diligently, often using Freedom on his computer so he could stay focused on his daily word count goal. Me? Not so

Literary Boroughs #16: Atlanta, Georgia

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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 section. The

Women in Trouble: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

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The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Enid Shomer Simon and Schuster, August 2012 464 pages $26.00 In 1873, newlyweds Henry and Clover Adams hired a dahabiyah to sail down the Nile, past the ancient temples and ruins from Philae to Abu Simbel. As Natalie Dykstra writes in her biography

THAT LIT, LIT LIFE (with global characteristics) 3 (of 14)

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And then you say you will / And then you won’t . . . “Undecided” (1938) by Sid Robin & Charlie Shavers About itineraries, here’s Robin Hemley’s: He was going to stopover in Hong Kong, and then he wasn’t, and then he was, wasn’t, and finally did because a