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Folklore + realism

My friend Alexi Zentner discusses his strategies for balancing fabulism and realism in his first novel, Touch. At Bookslut, Courtney Tenz compares his writing to Per Petterson’s.

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Comprehensive slang immersion

Thanks to Jonathon Green’s magnificent three-volume Dictionary of Slang, which arrived yesterday compliments of Oxford University Press, I’ve already learned that the first recorded use of “bad shag” dates to 1788, that to “beat skin”* (1944) doesn’t mean what you think, you pervert, and that the term “dude” was once (1883) considered so offensive that “a vigorous Bloomington woman cowhided . . .

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How Longfellow woke the dead

According to Jill Lepore, Longfellow’s much-maligned “Paul Revere’s Ride,” published the day South Carolina seceded from the Union, “was read at the time as a call to arms, rousing northerners to action.”

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A pale, gauzy curtain fluttering: Garman on Scarry

The human brain’s readiness to imagine “objects with certain characteristics, such as flimsiness and movement … has always been exploited by successful literary artists.” Emma Garman on Dreaming By the Book (and other critics on neglected faves).

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