2011
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Hannah Kingsley-Ma: The Last Book I Loved, The Great Gatsby
Lately, I’ve found myself in that kind of frenetic stage of higher education where I feel compelled to read all the books I’ve been told deeply matter. I figure reading the chosen few masterpieces is one of those requisite steps…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
How did people call each other terrible before Hitler? Perhaps you’d like to look at some solar prominences. The phrase of the week is “speculative polar cartography“. And some good space news! We’ve found three new weird planets, and we…
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The Rumpus Original Combo with Justin Torres
Justin Torres has had a lot of jobs. He worked on a farm. He walked dogs. He drove a truck, picking up donations around New England. He even had a stint at Brainwash, folding laundry. Thankfully, along the way he…
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We the Animals
We the Animals, the beautiful debut novel from Justin Torres, moves in small moments. Tiny chapters, spare prose, and meticulous sentences take us through the complicated, messy childhood of three brothers.
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Donnie Darko and the Tyranny of the Franks
Perhaps the most enduring movies are those that tempt us into deep interpretation even as they resist all efforts to impose meaning on them.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “A Primer for Small Weird Loves” by Richard Siken
I read Richard Siken’s collection of poems, Crush, in a single afternoon last summer. Lying on my stomach in the sun, I raced through each poem, occasionally lifting my head furtively to check around me for witnesses. His poems, such…
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Cortney Phillips: The Last Book I Loved, Property
I didn’t just love Valerie Martin’s Property—I devoured it, thought about it for weeks, forced it upon every single one of my reading friends, and even initiated a brief correspondence with the writer because I just had to talk about…
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Playing with Genre
“There’s a line by William Carlos Williams I mentioned in a speech: ‘The pure products of America go crazy.’ If you go for that kind of purity, you’re going to box yourself in a very small room. We are in…
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I’m Nothing If Not Polite
Notes From Irrelevance is a long weave of sentence shimmers with influences of someone who has read and absorbed a rich range, from classics to the most experimental, making each phrasing kinetic with questions about the way he has experienced…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Perhaps you are curious about that Physics Nobel Prize they gave out yesterday. Thank you for this: mid-century sci-fi illustration! While we’re on the subject, perhaps you have wondered what the 1920s version of sites like 50 Watts was. Salvador…