How did cowboy hats and boots become the visual iconography of American rural music?
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Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Stalin’s Scheherazade
An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Failure to Cooperate
The indignity and discomfort of being accused of theft: a short story about a long shift at the coffee shop everyone loves to hate.
Posted inUnapologetic Women, Writing
Arundhati Roy Doesn’t Care What You Think
While critics were measuring her life as the length of time between novels, Arundhati Roy was out in the world, living it.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Literature by the Numbers
Data journalist Ben Blatt takes his a mathematical approach to the writers of fiction.
Essay
Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.” —Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus, April 20, 2017 I. The Smartest Person in the Room I often say that one of the […]
Posted inBooks, History, Story
Nell Battle Lewis, Storyteller for Jim Crow
How an otherwise high-minded social reformer preserved and perpetuated her white supremacist worldview.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
On Not Being Able to Read
In law school, they told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Dorothy Allison on Why Working-Class Literature Is the Strongest
An interview with Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina, on growing up poor, finding her voice, the limitations of fiction, overcoming the stigma of poverty, and being a lesbian in Donald Trump’s America.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
The Memoirist’s Dilemma
Fourteen years after her memoir about about her father’s death was released, novelist Aminatta Forna still deals with after-effects, both good and bad.
