Making Sense of the “Floating Cultural Stew”

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Over at the L.A. Times, David Ulin argues that the art of the contemporary essay is “in a renaissance.”

He praises the recent essay collections of Tom Bissell and Mark Dery, adding them to the ranks of books like Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture, Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away, and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, all of which walk “an exhilarating tightrope between the personal and the critical, their most fundamental inquiries those the authors make about themselves.”

Charley Locke finds autumn beautiful in New Haven but prefers the sunny disposition of her hometown, Berkeley. When not interning at The Rumpus, she loves reading almost everything and traveling almost everywhere. She recently wrote a cookbook of recipes and interviews with Moroccan women, and hopes to return to the Maghrib soon, despite the lack of bacon. More from this author →