Q&A with Liza Libes

Whether you’re a newcomer or a long-time follower, you’ve been reading Pens and Poison, where you’ve learned everything from complex literary analysis to my educational hot takes. But who am I? Here’s your chance to learn all about Liza Libes, the poetic soul behind your favorite Pens and Poison posts! 

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Liza Libes
Proud Not to Be PhD

Every Sunday afternoon in the 3rd grade, sometime after lunch, my mom would drop me off at the old playground tire-swing, waiting by the sandbox with my little brother white I traveled to fairyland. That tire swing, bearing the weight of my two best friends and my imagination, transported us into another world—the fantasy world I had cooked up at eight years old that was the backdrop to the many whimsical stories I would tell my friends. 

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Liza Libes
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land - Part 1

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at Part 1 of this monumental 20th century poem about the futility of human intimacy. If you missed my intro to The Waste Land, you can read it here. 

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Liza Libes
Top 10 Books of All Time 

What are my top 10 books of all time and why? It’s a difficult question, albeit one I get asked quite often. To please both my interrogators and my indecisive, literary soul, I’ve made a compromise and added an eleventh book to my list (I really couldn't choose just 10). 

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Liza Libes
How to Develop a Personal Brand and Online Presence

In 2015, I realized that I couldn't call myself a writer without some semblance of an online presence. I had been dreading going public with my work for the entirety of high school: my poems and novels were so deeply personal that I shied away from sharing them with even the closest people in my life. At a certain point, however, I had to come to terms with the world that we live in and realize that if I ever wanted to make any sort of a name for myself, I would need to succumb to fostering an online presence—a personal brand. 

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Liza Libes
Weekly Literary Spotlight: László Krasznahorkai

Laszlo Krasznahorkai, born on January 5th, 1954, in Gyula, Hungary, is a contemporary Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for his complex, meandering prose and his fascination with apocalyptic themes. In this week’s Literary Spotlight, we briefly examine his life and glimpse his hypnotic, one-of-a-kind literary world.

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Izzy Tanashian
Darkness at Noon: A Liza's Book Club Study Guide

Darkness at Noon is a book about the political dissident Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, a high-ranking member of the Party who finds himself imprisoned and accused of treason. We’re never told what party he’s a member of, or even what country the book is set in, but given the author’s own life and the parallels to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, we can assume that the book is, if not set in, then at least heavily influenced by the Soviet Union and its intense political repression.

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What is Postmodernism?

I’ve talked about several books that we might consider “postmodern.” White Noise by Don DeLillo or The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, for instance. But what is postmodernism? 

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Liza Libes
Weekly Literary Spotlight: James Joyce

James Joyce, an iconic figure in 20th-century literature, revolutionized the way we understand narrative and language. His works, complex and formidable, have challenged the minds of generations of readers and scholars. In this week’s Literary Spotlight, we review Joyce’s life, his distinctive literary style, and a handful of his most significant works.

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