The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the genre for which he has become best known.
...moreOver 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.”
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For those of you with literary ambitions, be warned: this book might be painful. You will read A Sense of Direction and recall your confused chasing of said ambition, all that procrastination and thrown time, the (essential but still stinging) aimlessness, and you will realize just how much you sucked at it, how you even wasted your time-wasting.
...moreThe writer’s motto—the creator’s motto—should be: “Failure: It’s what’s for dinner.”
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Near the end of my first date with Mary, the woman who would become my wife and mother to my son, I asked her if she would mind going out with someone who had a thing for video games.