Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 15
December 28, 2014
December 24, 2014
"Gender, blah, blah, blah" by Katherine Angel
Women often resist being described as “women writers,” and with good reason. The need to prefix “writer” with a tag suggests that writer really means male writer (or perhaps, more specifically, white, straight male writer). It implies that readers need to be warned; that women are intruders on the default terrain — which, in the pages of many magazines, they are. Similarly, the idea of “women’s writing” provokes ambivalence precisely because it implies that women are writing only from, and about, their experience as women (unlike men, who are asking the big universal questions of interest to all, in their great American novels-to-be). The implication is that women are trapped within their particularity, unable to speak to those who don’t share it, while the writing of (straight, white) men is universal rather than particular. But everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere. Men’s experience is no less specific than women’s; it’s just that we fail to see it as such.
- “Gender, blah, blah, blah" by Katherine Angel at The Los Angeles Review of Books
December 20, 2014
"Making Poetic Sport of the Wounded" at Electric Literature
An essay on Don DeLillo’s End Zone and falling out of love with football.
- “Making Poetic Sport of the Wounded" at Electric Literature
December 18, 2014
Guston Paints Gass
William Gass painted by Philip Guston at Yaddo (1969)
December 17, 2014
"Leave Your Jeopardy! Anecdotes to Me" at McSweeney's Internet Tendency
I wrote a few Jeopardy! anecdotes for future contestants at McSweeney’s.
- “Leave Your Jeopardy! Anecdotes to Me”
December 15, 2014
December 10, 2014
"Hermey in New York" at Barrelhouse
I wrote some Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer fan fiction for Barrelhouse's Ghosts of Christmas Future series. Please enjoy this little bit of holiday sacrilege:
For Hermey, those snowy, lamp-lit evenings had lost their luster. Once, as a younger man, he would frequent the queen bars in the Village: bottomless glasses of bourbon and crushed up Klonopins. But he was six years sober and Karim could sense when he had been in the proximity of liquor. (He didn’t mind the nannying. Besides, those bars had been bought up by uptown carpetbaggers and stripped of their louche decadence.) He was supposed to call Karim when he finished with his last patient—an injury attorney with an impacted molar and low threshold for pain—but had forgotten to follow through on his promise.
Continue reading here…

December 5, 2014
"Surveillance" at Corium Magazine
I have a short piece (“Surveillance”) in the new issue of Corium Magazine. The issue features work from Claudia Smith, Glen Pourciau, Mel Bosworth, Rebekah Matthews, and many other fantastic writers.
On my way to a literary salon, which I was coerced into attending by a codependent poet friend, I stopped at a store called The Liquor Locker to pick up a bottle of wine. I spent several minutes considering what one drank at a literary salon (Beaujolais? Riesling?) before settling on a red from a local vineyard of modest repute. At the register the cashier scrutinized my appearance. I didn’t think much of it. It was entirely possible he eyed everyone in this fashion. (I knew I’d err on the side of suspicion if I worked at a place called The Liquor Locker.) He stopped punching keys and set the bottle down in a gesture of defiance.
December 4, 2014
David Hammons
December 1, 2014
"The Quiet Ambitions of the Short Novel" at The Oyster Review
I wrote an essay on short novels for The Oyster Review (Oyster's new literary mag):
This infatuation with the epic leads us to overlook smaller volumes of equal merit. (Why are “beach reads” so damn long? Who is spending that much time at the beach?) Ledgard and Baker communicate their ambitions in quieter ways than most: one by signaling towards the foreign and unfathomable, the other by focusing on the microscopically small. Length proves a deceptive measure. Yet the epic plays into our country’s preoccupation with size, that bigger-is-better mentality that permeates all aspects of our culture. The short novel, in its refusal to comply with cultural norms and market trends, feels almost subversive.
- “The Quiet Ambitions of the Short Novel" at The Oyster Review