The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Henkin
Joshua Henkin’s new, forceful novel, The World Without You, draws some of its power from this peculiar disconnect between the personal and the national.
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Posts by: Reese Okyong Kwon
The Rumpus Interview with Michael David Lukas
At first, I thought he was going to be a pornographer. I’d received a scholarship to attend a writers’ conference in Napa Valley and had a cheap flight to San Francisco, but I still had no ride from the airport to the conference, a two-hour drive away.
THE BLURB #15: The Monster Impulse
The panic that pervades these stories arises because in our real, human world there is too much cause for fear and worry. Who, exactly, is responsible for the deteriorating environment? What, precisely, causes terrorism? Enter the bugbears and scapegoats.
...moreFrom the Department of Possibly Lost But Nevertheless Immensely Worthwhile Causes
In all the understandable uproar about the impending disembowelment of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, I haven’t yet seen a suggestion that readers and writers try to do something about the situation.
And so, after a minute of crack sleuthing, I’ve discovered an address to which one can write to ask Northwestern University to reconsider their decision to get rid of TriQuarterly’s editorial board (after the jump).
...moreChaos
Sometimes, reading can feel like being on a roller-coaster–one of the classically vertiginous stomach-hurtling superstructures, like Coney Island’s Cyclone, say–but, of course, better.
“High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life” by Brian Christian, an essay in the latest issue of AGNI, made me giddy with the thrill of following the writer’s logical freefalls from chaos to probability to predictability to the problem with text autofill technology to why it is that small talk might make you want to kill yourself.
...moreKing James and the Battle for the Novel
There’s a sizable new interview with James Wood, polemical literary critic extraordinaire, up on LA Weekly. Colson Whitehead has spoofed him, Walter Kirn has mocked him, and there’s even a blog devoted solely to contradicting him–if you don’t already read him (in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere), it’s a good place to begin; if you do, well, here it is.
...moreSTORIES WE RECOMMEND: “Andy Catlett: Early Education”
I’ve been living in the Bay Area for nine months now, but after years in New York City I still feel like an exile here. Strangers’ smiles unnerve me; hikes, sadly, bore; driving terrifies. To ease the sense of displacement, however, there is the godsend that is The Threepenny Review, the quarterly literary magazine published in Berkeley.
...moreReese Kwon: The Last Book I Loved, The Modern Element
Sometimes I separate the books I intend, one day, to read, into two groups: the Bookcase of Desire, and the Bookcase of Guilt. Desire is made up of anticipated pleasures, the books I haven’t yet read only because time is cruel and limited: Bernard Malamud’s novels, for example, and Jude the Obscure, and Alice Munro’s most recent collection.
...moreTelevision, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the thirty-minute interview is posted in its entirety.
Mortals—Norman Rush’s Novel For Grown-ups
If I have learned anything from years of recommending this book, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing.