No Apologies: On Writing About My Mother’s Life

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I am halfway through a first draft. On bad days, I long for the comforts of fiction: the anonymity, the deniability.
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Natural Orders: On Hilary Leichter’s ‘Temporary’

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To be a temp, in other words, is to be an interim human being. It means having almost no rights and begging for scraps to survive. It means hearing, from comfortable superiors, that the world is reasonable and fair, that all you have to do to earn your grace is work hard, always work hard.
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Goodbye, Rush Limbaugh, and Good Riddance

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If he accomplished nothing else in his outlandish lifetime, Limbaugh revealed the bankruptcy, hypocrisy, and outright cruelty burning  in the heart of every right-wing moralist.
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Bird Brain: Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and the Literature of Twitter

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Given how comprehensively Twitter has re-wired our fundamental consciousness, it has seemed difficult to believe that no one has yet produced a book equal in expressiveness to its peculiar and otherworldly psychological glow.
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On Literature and Consciousness

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This is the greatest opening line in imaginative literature, because it’s the first one ever written. How can the invention of fiction itself be topped?
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What Is Wrong with Natasha?: On the Female “Type” in Tolstoian Tales

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This is what happens to Tolstoy’s female types. His bias of women wears the garment of universal truth: either they are attractive, childless, and morally suspicious charmers, or plain, dumb, dedicated mothers.
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Annotate This: On Footnotes

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Footnotes are several things at once – labyrinth, but also diagram; honeycomb and map; portrait of thought and bibliographic graveyard.
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Poe’s ‘Eureka’ Is a Galaxy-Brained Space Opera for Our Times

You and I might also, and just as profitably, take in the crucial life lesson: If you’re going to have a nervous breakdown, make it a spectacular one, complete with gawking audience and baffled fans. Go big or go home.

Reimagining and Remaking: On Healing from Workshop Trauma with Matthew Salesses’ ‘Craft in the Real World’

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It is a blueprint for a way forward to build better writing programs, and thus a new kind of writer and teacher who can imagine beyond a structure that often hurt them and left them in need of repair.
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Ten Ways to Lose Your Literature

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Just as all literature is haunted by the potential of oblivion, so all lost books are animated by the redemptive hope of their rediscovery.
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Obsession, Collection, and Connection: On Pixar’s ‘Soul’ and Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses

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Writing that takes a pin and drives it through obsession’s abdomen, splaying it open like one of Nabokov’s butterfly specimens.
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Letter from the Capitol

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The terrible logic of America is that our deepest nightmares and desires always have a way of enacting themselves, of moving from celluloid to reality.
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Pandemic Life by the Numbers: The Golden Five

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Slow it down, pause, take a moment. It's just five minutes, but you begin to see—the meaningfulness of small increments.
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On Dreams and Literature

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Dreaming and reading are unified in being activities of fully created, totally self-contained realities.
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Extinguishing the Self: On Robert Stone

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Stone's work reads as if it were composed to the tune of clanging blacksmiths and left to cool under the stars somewhere far from land. This is the conundrum of good writing. It can take you anywhere.
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Gravity and Grace and the Virus

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It was strangely comforting to read things that had been written in a time of crisis, yet one that was not this crisis, this unbearable time.
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What the Literature About Contemporary Korean Women’s Lives Illuminates About Our Own

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A quick survey suggests my experience is rather typical, how this hostile atmosphere begins when girls are still children, continues with everyday misogyny, and proceeds when the weaponized penis enters the workplace.
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Letting the Days Go By

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The song strikes me as a description of how we get through life: we let the days go by, riding on the backs of accumulated habits. Sometimes we wonder: how did we get here? I’m having one of those moments now. Maybe you are, too.
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