Brian Etling, The Millions

Brian Etling

The Millions

Greensboro, NC, United States

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • The Millions

Past articles by Brian:

Summer Belongs To Someone Else

Comments with unrelated links will be deleted. If you'd like to reach our readers, consider buying an advertisement instead. Anonymous and pseudonymous comments that do not add to the conversation will be deleted at our discretion. → Read More

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

“I think if a woman is absolutely happy with herself, that goes a long way in getting others to accept her choices. But it’s hard to be absolutely happy with yourself, whoever you are. I mean, what kind of maniac is that?” What kind of maniac are you? This interview with Mary Gaitskill from Guernica Magazine is fantastic. → Read More

Merry Pranksters

Comments with unrelated links will be deleted. If you'd like to reach our readers, consider buying an advertisement instead. Anonymous and pseudonymous comments that do not add to the conversation will be deleted at our discretion. → Read More

Parlez-vous Francais?

“One of the most rewarding parts of reading Jane Eyre as a thirteen-year-old Midwesterner is taking a wild shot in the dark at the meaning of all of the untranslated French passages.” Mallory Ortberg at The Toast takes a shot at translating some of Jane Eyre’s trickier passages. Bonus: here are a bunch of reasons why Mr. Rochester is a creep. → Read More

The Millions

“We’re both gay boys from the south, and we both write about growing up in places that deny the value and dignity of LGBTQ lives.” Garth Greenwell and Garrard Conley are headed to North Carolina! It’s not too late to catch the duo as they hit the second leg of their reading/anti-HB2 events across the Old North State. → Read More

Slouching Towards Summer

From “A Prayer For Maintaining At Least A Tenuous Hold On My Sanity” to “A Prayer for My Wrecked Bladder,” here are five prayers whispered by a first-year teacher as the school year slouches to a finish. → Read More

Disarmingly Like Love

“I quickly stopped trying to draw in a realistic way and went for an efficient one.” Max de Radiguès is a Belgian cartoonist whose work you should familiarize yourself with. → Read More

A Plate of Spaghetti

“A trip to the 21st century. Prague, maybe, or London, some big city where he can wander around being a bored tourist, snapping his gum, picking his nose in cathedrals, snapback on crooked and hopping from foot to foot, looking for a basketball court.” Thats what it would look like if Achilles (and other sad literary characters) got the holidays they deserved. → Read More

Books Helping People Help People

Recommended Reading: On Street Lit and how the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless is using literature in an attempt to help Austin’s homeless population. → Read More

To Grit or Not To Grit?

Recommended Reading: On whether or not “grit” is the true key to workplace (and lifetime) success. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, says yes. → Read More

Building the Labyrinth

“When gender’s not there, it sort of leaves room for us to focus on these other differences—and most of them end up being insignificant, too.” An interview with Emma Ramadan, translator of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, on writing, translating, and understanding genderless characters. → Read More

No Getting Without Giving

If Claudia Rankine writes it, it’s safe to say I’d recommend it. Here she is in a long, lovely essay on Adrienne Rich and her poetic transformations. → Read More

Indispensable Squares

“Nobody there but dirty old men who spit tobacco juice and try to look up your skirt.” The city square is one of the biggest architectural differences between the United States and Europe. Over at The Daily Beast, George Packer takes a look at plazas/piazzas and makes a case for why America needs more. → Read More

Going On Eleven

A new story by Hilary Mantel is always a cause for celebration. Good news: there’s one up now at the London Review of Books called “Kinsella In His Hole.” Huzzah! → Read More

Tarzan Have Metrics

“Tarzan know, Tarzan know: ‘Mood? Me want to write like Warren Buffett. Mood — that for house DJ or Al Green.'” Here is Tarzan’s Guide to Elliptical Style For Effective Business Writing from the good people over at McSweeney’s. → Read More

Pathological Point-Making

Comments with unrelated links will be deleted. If you'd like to reach our readers, consider buying an advertisement instead. Anonymous and pseudonymous comments that do not add to the conversation will be deleted at our discretion. → Read More

Then I Go To Bed

Want to know how the other side is living? Here’s a detailed look at how hotel consultant and noted historian Stanley Turkel spends his Sundays. → Read More

To Burn, or Not To Burn

The Russian Ministry of Culture has come under fire recently after accusations were levied by the Russian Writers’ Union of some 500 books having been removed from libraries by authorities in the Komi republic–and another fifty allegedly incinerated in the process. Most of these were textbooks published with money from the Soros Fund, run by hedge fund … → Read More

What Should Be 'Forbid'

“On closer inspection, however, the book comes off as something more complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination. Its elaborate descriptions of pleasure given and taken start to seem like scrims for a moral argument about what sorts of sexual behaviors should be ‘forbid’ and which should be encouraged—an argument … → Read More

Using a Writer's Tools

“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Go and check out this fascinating profile of Ben Rhodes, the “Boy Wonder of the Obama Whitehouse,” who dropped out of his second year at NYU’s M.F.A. program after witnessing the attacks on September 11th to take up a life of international affairs and foreign … → Read More