Posts by author
Jesse Nathan
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The Rumpus Interview with Rumpus Managing Editor Isaac Fitzgerald
This last February, I pulled out the recorder, told [Isaac] to sit still, and peppered him with questions.
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Chasing J.X. Williams: The Rumpus Interview With Noel Lawrence
J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long. Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos,…
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The Wind Has Stopped Blowing (Your Pockets Are Filled With Wind)
It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained.…
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Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova a.k.a. Gala Dali
Artists are fickle, except when they’re not, and then their lovers are. Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova was born in Tatarstan, Russia to a family of intellectuals — as a kid she hung out with future poet Marina Tsvetaeva. (Tsvetaeva would write…
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A Novel, A Junta, A Murdered Bishop
A book—that’s an artifact, often long, filled with deep analysis, and pages, and made of paper—by Francisco Goldman undoes an electoral campaign, triggers assassinations, and drags its author into a political minefield in Guatemala. But can the tome bring closure…
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STORIES WE RECOMMEND: “The Mourning Door”
Nearly a decade after Ploughshares published it, Elizabeth Graver’s short story “The Mourning Door” remains shrouded in a slippery surrealism that’s at once impenetrable and, simultaneously, the source of the piece’s staying power. In it, Graver’s pregnant narrator discovers a…
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Strunk and White take it on the chin
The Elements of Style, the classic writing handbook by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr., just turned fifty. The New York Times celebrated by posting the opinions of five “experts” on its blog about the book. All of them turn…
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“Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling?”
In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked).
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Florida’s Torture Chamber for Delinquent Boys
For 109 years, Florida has sent bad boys to the Florida School for Boys–for things like rape and assault, yes, but also for petty infractions like truancy or smoking in the bathroom, or sometimes because the state wanted an easy…
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The End of Mass Media
“Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place,” writes Crichton, “and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the…
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True/Slant/Hmmmm
It’s worth applauding the creative efforts behind True/Slant. It’s a website founded by a former AOL executive who’s hired 65 “knowledge experts.” “Knowledge experts,” in this context, means professional journalists or commentators, some of whom work for the New York…