Category: Lit
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The Apotheosis of Kesha
Have to thank my boyfriend for this one: he played me Kesha new single, Praying with zero prelude. I didn’t know the voice but did know I liked it. I liked the solitary beginning, the unwinding middle, the final transcendence. I heard it without the backstory: the Free Kesha T Shirts and Dr. Luke struggles, the crazy…
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First draft, second draft
Mundane details, no rhythm, superfluous descriptions, cliche descriptions (up to date) and motivations (why else does one watch the news?). Poor Jacqui has a vegetable consciousness in this draft. Jesus, can you imagine reading 200 pages of that?
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Colum McCann on creating memorable characters, from Letters to a Young Writer
There are certain figurative bipeds still clucking around in my head. They come from the book Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, and they’re as alive as when I first read it in 2011. When I read his book Letters to a Young Writer, that came out April 6 of this year, I…
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Debut novelists Gina Sorell, Lynda Cohen Loigman, Jesse Chaffee & Janet Benton share their experience with publishing
14, 7, 20 years. These are some of the numbers you’ll likely hear if you ask a writer how long they’ve been thinking about their first novel.
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“The Evenings” by Gerard Reve
It’s been called the best Dutch novel of the 20th century, and it was just translated into English this year (apparently it caused quite the scandal). I’m loving it so far, particularly the dialogue. Sample: The gravy is exemplary,” Frits said, “It’s absolutely heavenly.” The Evenings by Gerard Reve