Charles D’Ambrosio’s Fast Friends
For the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering, and explains why he thinks that D’Ambrosio, in essays, has “found the perfect medium.”
...morePosts Tagged: essays
The Essay Makes a Comeback
2014 has already been called “The Year of the Debut” as a way of recognizing all the amazing debut novels published over the last twelve months. Now Jason Diamond is calling 2014 “The Year of the Essay,” pointing out the growing popularity in the non-fiction form and telling us why he values it so much:
...moreReading fiction is one of my true loves, but essays help me to understand things about the world, the writer, and if they’re really great, myself.
The Big Idea #10: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines. ...more
Slouching Toward Didion
The Daily Beast takes a look at the history of the female essayist from Didion to Dunham:
...moreFrom cultural critic Susan Sontag and journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist (and Dunham’s mentor) Nora Ephron, and on through to the host of talented female essayists writing today, this is clearly a flourishing genre that the following women writers—in my mind some of the best writing today—are very much making their own; as Carol Hanisch famously declared in 1969, the personal is political; if, that is, one’s personal experience is mined eloquently and intelligently enough.
A Footnotes Advocacy
...moreMany readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they’re too raw to digest, and often stiff.
The Unteachable Dark
Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the rigid way American high schools teach essay writing.
...moreThe Last Laugh
Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates:
...moreI think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor to it.
One Giant Cliché
When I became a father myself, I swore my son would never feel my absence like that—not if I could help it. I’d talk to him. I’d listen, ask questions. I’d teach him things, too, and share in the joys of his discoveries. It didn’t occur to me that what he might need would be something entirely different. ...more
I Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
My connection to my Puerto Rican heritage seemed as tenuous as my connection to my white skin. I didn’t feel white, didn’t believe I had the privileges that came with whiteness. ...more
Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do not.
While Cole continues to stand by this essay, he admits that there are exceptions to this rule.
...moreRoxane Gay and Leslie Jamison Get Personal About Essays
Rumpus essays editor and author of the forthcoming essay collection Bad Feminist Roxane Gay sat down to talk with The Empathy Exams author Leslie Jamison and Michele Filgate; the three women had an insightful conversation about essays, sexuality, and nuance over on Salon.
...moreAnnie Dillard and the Art of the Essay
“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”
Read an essay on Annie Dillard’s philosophy of the essay and its writer over at Brain Pickings.
...moreDrugs and Creativity
Gila Lyons has a strikingly vulnerable essay at The Millions about her decision to start taking anti-anxiety medication. Typically, artists who suffer from mental health issues opt to ride against the current and let their creativity take precedent. Yet, Lyons took the road less traveled and chose mental stability over waxing genius.
...moreHow Has the Internet Changed Longform Journalism?
Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited audiences.
...moreIs It Time to Get Rid of College Essays?
Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utterwasteof their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers.
In a prickly and provocative essay for Slate, Rebecca Schuman argues that universities should stop forcing students in required classes to writer papers and instead give them “old-school, hardcore exams, written and oral.
...moreCome To The Frequencies #3 Release Party In LA!
LA Rockers! Go to Stories Books and Cafe tonight at 7 pm for the release of Two Dollar Radio’s Frequencies #3, a biannual journal of artful essays.
The release party features the stylistic readings of Rumpus contributor Grace Krilanovich and Sara Finnerty, as well as Trinie Dalton, Anne-Marie Kinney, and Aaron Shulman.
...moreCelebrating the Essay
The topic of essayism—one especially relevant to the Rumpus—is granted the meticulous attention it deserves in this opinion piece Christy Wampole wrote for the New York Times.
Wampole artfully weaves the essay’s deep history through a narrative about the development of a “meditative deficiency” in modren essay-writing.
...moreKeep Doubt Alive with Essays
If you’re a regular Rumpus reader, you probably like essays. And if you like essays, you’ll probably enjoy this New York Times opinion piece about their literary and social value:
...moreEver since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled “What do I know?” and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution, and self-doubt.
My Heart is an Idiot Book Trailer
Earlier this month, we spoke with Davy Rothbart about the his new collection, My Heart Is an Idiot, lauded in this week’s Rumpus review as “16 essays that read like early Jack Kerouac, if you substituted Charlie Parker for Dr.
...moreMoney Novels
In the current issue of BookForum, Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books, writes about “the perils of money fiction” in the twenty-first century.
“There are a few ways out of these traps—ersatz journalistic gap filling, hapless gesturing at the system’s perversity, and ogling fortune with envy and scorn—of writing about bankers.
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
Rumpus Books had one hell of a week this week, and today’s a good day as any to catch up.
The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
It’s Sunday again, that day where you get to see what Rumpus Books has been up to this week, all in one handy little roundup.
To Preserve One Life
A Review of Writing in the Dark, by David Grossman
BY BRIAN SCHWARTZ
In the Hebrew language, I am sure, there are several different ways to say “enemy.” I have little grasp of what these words might be. I imagine that there are milder entries
...more