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“Beruffled Little Wet Apron” or “Vast and Prodigious Cadence of Water”?:...
As a child in the Midwest, I was shocked to find out that my parents hadn’t honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which I’d thought was sort of a requirement. It turned out that they’d instead spent three...
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Harold Bloom’s Song of Self
Here’s the story of my first and only encounter with Harold Bloom. It was the first week of a new semester, my last semester of graduate school, and I was waiting in a stuffy seminar room packed with...
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The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Centrifugal Force” by...
People want to believe that Mark Twain once said, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” though there’s zero evidence to back up his authorship. While others have claimed to know the quote’s true...
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Do-Overs: 5 Books that Tell The Untold Story
Some of the best rewrites of classic stories come to us through the author’s imaginings of what the original doesn’t say. Through original work that transcends “fan fiction,” these stand-alone novels...
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“Cow Country” And The Problem With Pseudonyms
A recent post on the Harper’s blog has gotten me thinking about pseudonyms. In it, Art Winslow posits that a new novel, Cow Country, from an obscure vanity press was actually authored by Thomas...
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The Fairytale Redux: On Patrick deWitt’s “Undermajordomo Minor”
The last thing the world needs is another reimagining of the fairy tale. It has been done from every angle: straightforward, post-modern, and (yawn) from the villain’s perspective. So it was with some...
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Literary Blueprints: The Orphan
In the wide realm of literature, having parents is a convenience that escapes many characters. The Orphan is one of the most prominent characters in literature, in part because the absence of...
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Writer & Artist: What We Can Learn from Writers Who are Both
In many ways, visual art gave birth to literature. The first stories written down were cave paintings. For years our alphabet was made up of pictographs which simply meant that the only people who...
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Mark Twain and Literary Caves
By Jojo, en:Jojo_1, pl:Jojo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia CommonsOn road trips, I’ve taken to stopping at caves. Cave systems may be the...
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Round-Up: Mark Twain, George Saunders, and Barack Obama
From Mark Twain’s unpublished story to Barack Obama’s relationship with books, here’s the latest literary news: A previously unfinished children’s story by Mark Twain will be released by Doubleday...
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