June 2011
15 posts
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A Way No Longer Had by Jessica Newman
London grew impossible. Its turns forgot themselves, took new direction. Cobblestones loosened like teeth. The dim became permanent, the kind of dim in which everything takes a shape slightly different from its own.
A girl, to navigate the streets, sewed her fingers into sails. She landed on outcroppings, things of metal and stone. She learned to balance in the wind, to catch it in her cheeks. On...
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Deleting the Oxford Comma
I’m heartbroken. I feel like the world’s grammarians & linguists have just told me to stop writing “and” in favor of ampersands &&&.
No, you know what? I feel like they just told me to stop using Oxford commas, which is equally horrifying. The ”Punctuation” section of Oxford University’s “Writing and style guide” now states:...
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Letters
I’m a big ol’ snoop; I’ve never been ashamed of this and willingly admit that I will probably look through your drawers and Google you. I’m sorry! I’m cursed by insatiable curiosity.
Which leads to my love of letters. I enjoy writing letters, finding the practice cathartic and illuminating. Everything makes a little more sense when I write it out to someone else....
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@JMTohline →
Twitter has naturally become a wellspring of nano-fiction. J.M. Tohline, author of THE GREAT LENORE, writes very good Twitter stories. An example: “A story: She didn’t like the way his face looked. But she didn’t have the heart to tell him. So she said ‘I do.’ The end.”
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“Aren’t we all, I thought, somebody’s harvest?”
– Amy Hempel, “The Harvest”
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The Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Behold: my love and nemesis.
The Community Bookstore, on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, is the messiest bookstore I’ve visited. Books piled on books, covers kissing covers. And about half of the inventory is in boxes or crates that one can shift through for hours. Need a well-loved Larousse Gastronomique for $25 or Colum McCann’s latest for $5? Go.
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“Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands....”
– Meg Wolitzer, The Wife
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