Archive

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  Mentors: Marvin Mudrick

  I would not tear papers apart — say they're no good and say they don't work — unless I believed that all of you are capable of writing good fiction.

  Bob Blaisdell, Jervey TervalonDec 30, 2011
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  Mentors: Alison Leslie Gold

  What Gold modeled for me was the idea that the writer delivers stories that the reader needs. The point is to do that job well.

  Rita WilliamsDec 28, 2011
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  Mentors: J.H. Prynne

  I sometimes say that Jeremy Prynne taught me everything I know about poetry: which is why I know nothing about poetry.

  Geoff NicholsonDec 28, 2011
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  The Afterlife of Tintin

  Tintin est Mort!

  Dec 27, 2011
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  Mentors: Barry Hannah

  "There are some howlers among the pros as delectable as the successes and just as fine a tool of learning."

  Clarissa RomanoDec 26, 2011

• Rereading Catch-22

  For many years, I believed that my favorite novel was Catch-22.

  Dec 24, 2011
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  The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future

  "The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future" is an experiment not in terror and not necessarily Dickensian.

  Antoine Wilson, Ayelet Waldman, Ben Ehrenreich, Ben Loory, Dinah Lenney, Gary Phillips, Jane Smiley, Jennifer Egan, Julie Cline, Laila Lalami, Mark Haskell Smith, Mary Otis, Matt Weiland, Meghan Daum, Morgan Macgregor, Padget Powell, Sesshu Foster, Stephen Elliott, Sven BirkertsDec 23, 2011

• A Singer's Singer

  Reconstructing the luminescent career of Willie John the “stone genius.”

  Gayle WaldDec 23, 2011

• Object Relations

  There's no doubt that Hammons is one of the most important artists — conceptual, black, or otherwise — to emerge in America in the last 50 years.

  Dec 22, 2011

• Philosophical Improvisations

  Improvisation is an art of time in search of the present.

  Jon CotnerDec 20, 2011
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  PODCAST: Philosophical Improvisations

  Part philosophy, part self-help, part experiment in nonfiction, part a book-length interview.

  Dec 20, 2011
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  L.A. Woman

  What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Joan Didion or Nathanael West is that a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy.

  Steffie NelsonDec 18, 2011

• Was Gertrude Stein a Collaborator?

  Stein recommends Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize, just as Freud "recommends" the Gestapo — with the same perfect irony.

  Dec 17, 2011

• Thoroughly Modern Elsa

  Since her rediscovery by scholars over a decade ago, photographs of the Baroness have become, in their way, as iconic of the era of Dada as any.

  Brian Kim StefansDec 16, 2011

  • Art & Architecture

  • Nonfiction

• The Girl with the Father Tattoo

  And so it was that daughters, perhaps more relationally adept on average, became the more fertile conduit for paternal ambition.

  Dec 16, 2011

• The Right Fit: Nicholas de Monchaux’s “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo”

  The entire effort to go to the moon should be rightly understood as an elaborate apparatus for the production of a single television image.

  Rosten WooDec 14, 2011