Author: e.v. de cleyre

Review: FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss
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Review: FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss

Forest Dark Nicole Krauss Harper Collins; September 2017 304 pp; $27.99 Buy: hardcover | eBook In February 2015, a small, easy-to-miss column appeared at the beginning of Elle magazine. Squeezed between advertisements, novelist Nicole Krauss wrote of her grandmother’s career as a door-to-door bra saleswoman in London from 1949 to 1954. Her grandmother wore a…

aerial photography of city during night time

The Internet in Literature: Sven Birkerts, Jennifer Egan, Chuck Klosterman, Jarett Kobek, & Patrick Madden

Kurt Vonnegut, in A Man Without a Country (as quoted by Chuck Klosterman), writes, “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” Yet books set before the ubiquity of the internet often grace bestseller lists and win major awards.

assorted hear-shape candies on white bowl
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On Sentimentality: Zoe Heller, Leslie Jamison, Nate Pritts, & Mary Ruefle

When we talk about sentimentality in literature, we talk about the “contemporary, pejorative sense of the word,” Zoe Heller writes for the New York Times. A word defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality or state of being sentimental especially to excess or in affectation.” A word with synonyms such as gooeyness, lovey-doveyness, mawkishness, saccharinity, and sappiness….

On the Art of Perspective: Christopher Castellani & Maggie Nelson
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On the Art of Perspective: Christopher Castellani & Maggie Nelson

“I want to tell you what happened on the way to dinner.” Christopher Castellani‘s The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story begins with that simple phrase, the driving force of storytelling: the author has something they want to convey. Which quickly leads us to the issue of how to convey it. Castellani, a Ploughshares…