Category: Writing
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the influence of anxiety
Fredric Jameson, clearing his throat before a long piece (from 2007) on the half-centennial of Garcia Garquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude: Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you…
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a recurring theme in literary and cinematic history
This piece by Megan Marz at Real Life references a lot of (contemporary, literary?) fiction that I’m completely unfamiliar with, but in the context of a phenomenon I am more familiar with, and very interested in, as both a writer and a human being: the slipperiness and perpetual redefinition of the word story. The whole…
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it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage
My most recent review filed at (but, I think, not yet published at?) the BSFA Review is of The Art of Space Travel, a collection of Nina Allan’s short fiction. It was a somewhat out-of-the-comfort-zone commission, which is exactly why I chose it; in addition to reading outside my home range, I’m also trying to…
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a means of self-branding, hardened into postures
Offered without gloss or comment, other than “read the whole thing”. Nor will a besieged establishment’s loud existential fears of ‘wokeness’ drown out this simple imperative: that to live attentively in our times, when voices long suppressed are beginning to be heard, is necessarily to awaken to centuries of brutal history. There is no question…