Authors Archive

From Manic to Magical: Reflections on Bruce Chatwin

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It took me less than five minutes via Google Maps to find where English travel writer Bruce Chatwin had lived during his time Edinburgh.

First Women in American Literature

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If you’re anything like me (and lucky for you if you’re not) then you’ve spent most of the last week wallowing your way from one shot glass to another and brushing your teeth with the cuff of your old college sweatshirt.

To See Beauty in the Dark

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Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to crawl out of said couch and attend a poetry reading organized by Black Poets Speak Out. The event featured three co-founders–Amanda Johnston, Mahogany L. Browne, and Jericho Brown–interspersed with selections from the project’s video archive of Black poets reading into webcams.

Reading Frantumaglia After the Unmasking of Elena Ferrante

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It’s been impossible to ignore the furor surrounding the revelation of Elena Ferrante’s identity last month. Some consider it an inevitability, yet the majority of her fans seem to feel that it is enough to have been given the gift of her writing, without expressly violating her wishes.

Anonymity, Truth, and Authenticity: the Ferrante Papers

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I’ll admit that I do believe in knowing about the author when I’m reading a book. The limits of an approach that is basically all about the text, and nothing but the text – so that taking into account biographical or historical elements, in short replacing the text within

The Strange Story of the World’s First Badass Accountant

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This fall, for the first time in my life, I’ve been teaching undergraduates. For the first time in their lives, they’ve had someone ask them whether there are surprise dance parties on campus. Surprise dance parties are, in my experience, one of the pinnacles of an undergraduate liberal arts

The Long Gaze: When Poets Write Memoir

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With many contemporary poets publishing (sometimes multiple) memoirs, there’s clearly a desire for these writers to share their worlds in a form other than poetry. Is it as simple as the appealing arc of a compelling narrative? What other issues might come to bear, particularly in our current social

It’s All In the Voicing

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It’s the time-in-a-place, couldn’t-have-happened-any-other-way moments we keep close like the pillars of our personal pantheons that create lives out of impulsive decisions, unfortunate situations, and well-timed placement. It’s the first times that are finales to culminated forces – sometimes well planned, sometimes purely by chance – and the beginnings

Robert Walser’s True Truths

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To write about Robert Walser when considering the unsung modernists of the 20th century seems both a falsehood and a complete necessity.

Night Radio, Collect: Listening to Ray Bradbury

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In the dark, being told stories carries weight. There’s a power there, for some stories, that doesn’t seem to exist during the day. When I was a child, my family would take daytrips in the car and when we drove home it would be night. My mom would turn