Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Unsung Women of Rock and Roll
The sensitivity of male egos, the demands of motherhood, and the general disdain for female ambition made loneliness the likely lot of the chick singer. For the young, female rock-and-roll fan, the arm of a male musician might have seemed more welcoming. Girlfriends and wives appeared as fairy-tale heroines who held royal sway in the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Nancy Meyers on Writing a Film Without a Romance
In a conversation with New York magazine, Nancy Meyers talks about her new film The Intern, and why she didn’t want to write another romantic comedy.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ancient Myths, Trigger Warnings, and Our Unsafe World
Earlier this year, an op-ed written by members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board argued that Ovid’s Metamorphoses should be taught with a trigger warning because the myths of Daphne and Persephone “include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault.” Needless to say, a lot of people had thoughts about this. In a recent essay-cum-open-letter for Oregon Humanities, poet Wendy Willis issued an […]
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Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths
Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]
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Before the Internet, Your Lies Could Only Travel So Far
“I’m sure there were phonies who claimed to be the sole survivor of Thermopylae,” [Don] Shipley says. “Guys that claimed service at Gettysburg, Valley Forge. But they could only project it down a couple of barstools at the village pub. Now with the internet, you can be anyone you want to be.” —Michael Gaynor writing for Washingtonian about […]
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The Early Roots of Surgery
The first recorded cases of cancer show how the Ancient Egyptians used cauterisation (using red-hot instruments to burn off tissue and seal off wounds) to destroy tumours and to treat a variety of infections, diseases and bleeding lesions. Until the mid-18th century, surgery was the only effective option for addressing several conditions. But it was […]
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Putting a Writing Life on Display
Frank moved her living room furniture into Seattle’s Central Library. For 30 days, she brought her laptop and headphones and set up shop on her own couch, in the middle of the library.
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Trouble Between the Buns at Whataburger
There’s nothing simple about selling simple burgers for a living. The decades-long relationship between Whataburger’s parent company and the Andrews family’s successful Whataburger franchises soured recently, when the Andrews’ company filed a lawsuit, claiming Whataburger violated an agreement. In Texas Monthly, Loren Steffy writes about the bad blood and changing corporate culture at Texas’ second-largest […]
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The Evangelical Fervor for Amish Romance
In “More Titillated Than Thou,” Ann Neumann draws on her childhood memories of Lancaster, the findings of inspirational-lit critics, and her knowledge of evangelical purity culture.