Posts by month
June 2012
286 posts
Notable San Francisco: 6/18-6/24
This Week in San Francisco: it’s pride week! Monday 6/18: The LitSlam is a “live performance-curated poetry publication where the audience serves as the Editors,” and the loudest cheers determine…
The Last Book I Loved: Birds of America: Stories
I am a voyeur to the core. Keep your house lit at night and I will peer in to see how you spend your time alone, or what colors you’ve painted your walls. Invite me in and I will pick through your bookshelves and look at all your family photos on the mantle while you make me a drink. Ask me to stay and I will rummage through your things for what you’ve been hiding in those closets of yours. Write me a book with characters who are so real and precisely drawn that I can feel their warmth in the seat next to me, and I will sign out of Facebook and devour it.
The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The title of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s most recent novel, The Truth About Marie, is an impish wink and a nudge to the reader. The plot, such as it is, involves a…
Notable New York, This Week 6/18-6/24
This week in NYC: MONDAY 6/18: This sounds like a fun party game. Four writers—Saara Dutton, Daniel Guzmán, Michael Maiello, and Peter Olson—imagine a discarded novel by Stephen King and…
Lit-Link Round-up
As this goes live, I should be landing in London. I used to live there, spending the better parts of 1988-90 in the city as a student, a squatter, a…
Sunday Rumpus Serialization: Your Life in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (#1)
Looking back, you see than while many things happened before Renee was killed, this is really where all the other things start and, to a certain degree, end . . .
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: But I Don’t Want to Get Gone
So many people were reading Gone Girl by the time I’d heard of it that I knew I had to get on the train. It’s a thriller, a potboiler. It’s terribly engaging.
It’s Bloomsday
James Joyce’s most famous works were long, complicated and, depending on who you’re asking, arguably inaccessible novels. But writing to his four-year-old grandson Stephen (yes, that Stephen) in August 1936…
Time Interviews Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed talks with Time about Wild, Dear Sugar and Tiny Beautiful Things, how the Pacific Crest Trail has changed since 1995, current projects, and more. “My intent was—stories, poems,…
OG DAD: Lick the Sofa and Die
My fear, as a late-in-the game dad, was that somehow I’d end up in diapers before my baby was out of them.