2011
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The Last Book I Loved: Room
I sat on my surfboard dangling my feet into the cold ocean, as the setting sun brightened the sky with pinks and oranges. Out on the water, away from the busyness of Los Angeles, there isn’t a man-made sound to…
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Donald Does NYC
Tomorrow, February 8th, former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld is releasing his new memoir, Known and Unknown (read the Rumpus Unreview of the book here). In what could only be divine coincidence that is also the release date of Donald…
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Russian Winter
In this “magnificent” first novel, an aging ballerina looks back on life, betrayal, and loss in the former Soviet Union.
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Notable New York, This Week 2/07-2/13
This week in New York actors celebrate Tennessee Williams at the 92nd Street Y, poets celebrate Elizabeth Bishop, pre-Valentine’s Day advice from love gurus at Speed Shrinking, Major Jackson reads his poetry, novelists discuss the future of the novel, and…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Adorable news to start your Monday: Dog Show pig! Hurray! Rejection the Gertrude Stein way. Soviet space secrets are the best kind of secrets. National Geographic looks at the Paris catacombs, which is basically my favorite thing (I have a…
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Erin Rose’s Tech Links
We’re similar in lots of ways, so why do the US & Europe have such different attitudes towards Internet privacy? “Hackerville” – a sleepy town in Romania filled with cybercriminals in Benzes. Congress grills Mr. Zuckerberg over Facebook’s plans to…
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Back Out of All This Now I Am An Animal Full of Music: Noelle Kocot’s The Bigger World
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” — Emily Webb Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
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Helping the Descendants of Henrietta Lacks
“I first envisioned it as a foundation for education, but I realized that the people who were affected the most were her kids, and they needed some medical care and dental care,” Ms. Skloot said from her home in Chicago.…
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Judging a Book by Its Cover
I’ll admit that I’ve used cover art as a deciding factor in purchasing or not purchasing a book. For instance, I do not buy books that have had their covers changed due to a movie tie-in. This week’s lesson on…
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Welcome to Sunday
Due to AWP-fueled exhaustion, I will be leaving you in the hands of LaToya Jordan today. Until next week, here is a video of Douglas Kearney giving an incredible reading. I saw him at the Fence event last night (which…
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Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by…
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The Lay Of The Land
As a writer trying to write about “America,” my biggest struggle has been fully grasping the variety of spaces that is contained within America. Which is why I’ve been an avid supporter of the Center For Land Use Interpretation for…