My favorite cover of an Elvis Costello song so far: “The Comedians” by Roy Orbison. Malcolm Gladwell spends the first 10 minutes of his “Hallelujah” podcast lambasting Elvis Costello’s Goodbye Cruel World. He calls it “awful,” “disastrous,” and “unlistenable.” He emphasizes…
3-2-5 Paragraphs on Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I think the problem is I read the prequel immediately after reading the first book, Who Fears Death? While it is an interesting book that could have potentially explored the…
3-2-5 Paragraphs on Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor This is the third Nnedi Okorafor book I’ve read. The second didn’t really count because it was a prequel to the first. I kept thinking that this is what War of the Worlds would look like…
#NPM17: Sylvia Plath
When I wasa BOY POET in high school I was in love with Sylvia Plath. I didn’t know at the time that she was a SAD GIRL poet that only sad girls could like. We the sad girls and me were…
Hemon’s Book of Lives
Aleksandar Hemon’s book of essays, The Book of My Lives reminded me that when I moved back home after failing to make it on my own after college, Yugoslavians were leaving their homes to escape what The Atlantic called “horrific acts of ethnic…
Thad Rutkowski’s Ponderous Pops
In her introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara Masih defines flash fiction using Stuart Dybek’s description of rain from his short story, “Nighthawks”: “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each…