Archive for May, 2011


Brief interview with Jamaica Kincaid

“One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.” — Jamaica Kincaid, who has a novel excerpt out in Little Star

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Kate Christensen on her “inner dick”

Kate Christensen has an essay in the latest Elle on writing “In a Man’s Voice.” (She’s an expert on the subject; three of her novels, including the upcoming The Astral, have male narrators.) All of you — men not exempted — must read it. Here’s an excerpt: The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a . . .

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May 21, 2011: The Rapture meets my 40th birthday

It would probably be funny if I hadn’t grown up in absolute terror of being Left Behind. Okay, it’s funny anyway, as long as I don’t have to be sober. My latest piece for The Awl is about the convergence of my fortieth birthday and Harold Camping’s predicted May 21 Rapture, but it’s also about a lot more, including fervent . . .

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Mark Twain’s childhood biography of Satan

In the midst of working on something for The Awl, I returned to Twain’s brilliant riff — from Is Shakespeare Dead? — on his boyhood obsession with Satan. Here it is, for the uninitiated. When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about . . .

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