August 2010
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The rise of dystopias has enabled what amounts to a new form of propaganda. And it’s a new form of propaganda that is particularly dangerous because we find ourselves so
entertained by its message that we’re reluctant to give it up. The Devil’s greatest trick was not to convince us he didn’t exist; it was to make us enjoy the thing that would destroy us. Ask David Foster Wallace about that one.
by
JC Hallman
The thing is that there’s a reason just-so stories are usually inventions, tall tales, even lies. It’s because ordinary life, in a finite universe, in an infinite universe, is fatally full of mysteries and contradictions. There are always edges we can’t past. If we do, maybe we just loop back around to ourselves. There are all those things I don’t want to live without the answers to, but then, here I am, living.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"As for the novelist’s mask, the memoir form strips it away, of course, and it has to be replaced by something. To me, that’s the author’s honesty and pitiless self-examination. Get to the root of yourself, and you likely get to a root that’s universal."
by
JC Hallman
"One of the things I learned while discovering Adam Robison is that I don't have grand thoughts. I am very rarely amused by thinking about stuff. So I knew my poems had to be little and unambitious, but who wants to read something that doesn't do anything? So I put a bunch of weird colloquialisms in there to keep people reading. Which sounds silly or diminishing or falsely modest, so let me say that I also did this because I wanted to point out that it is a thing that can be done."
by
Blake Butler
None of our closest living relatives, the great apes, lives monogamously. Indeed, female nonhuman primates across the board are attracted to novelty, that is to say, to fresh rather than familiar males. It’s the pattern, rather than any single species’ behavior, that matters here.
by
Barbara J. King
"Americans are the marrying kind. Perhaps that's why even blue families, men and women who've gotten their educations, wind up getting married and staying married. That's also why gay marriage is not just a symbol of equality but also just how much respect marriage actually commands in this culture."
by
Amy DePaul
"The saddest moment of being an author/artist is when you create something you believe in with your whole heart that you want to share with the world and no one is interested. So I am thrilled when the reverse happens."
by
Terry Hong
UNO Press stepped outside of the standard reportage boundaries and acknowledged the voices of those on the ground as more than sound bites on the evening news. Initiated in the months following Katrina, the Narrative Project involved UNO students and faculty members interviewing dozens of people across Louisiana and Mississippi in an effort to gather their stories in an oral history project.
by
Colleen Mondor
"I’m an emotionalist, I guess. Trying to nail down the exact emotion of a situation, or even of an inanimate object in a given situation… seems (sometimes) the most important thing to be accurate about. Like we can tell ourselves everything about the position and magnitude of our troops in the hills, or the insurgents or militant clerics, but those are just facts. It doesn’t explain why what really happens happens."
by
Ruth Tobias
