Literary experimentation, when it is well done, tickles the senses and stimulates the mind. The best kind—the “murderous and sharp” kind, according to Jacob Bacharach—urges its readers to reevaluate the novel and its capabilities. Edmond Caldwell’s Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant is such a novel, claims Bacharach in the latest The Last Book I Loved.
Then, in a rousing review of George Albon’s poetry collection, Fire Break, Benjamin Landry draws parallels between Albon and Wallace Stevens. Beauty, in Albon’s collection, is a kind of personal defense mechanism. “Part of what makes Albon’s exploration uniquely compelling,” Landry writes, “is that it collapses the known and the unknown in ways that are demonstrable and immediately apparent.”
And in the Sunday Rumpus Interview with Emily Parker—author of the new book, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground—topics range from communist China, to Cuba, to Russia. Parker, formerly a foreign correspondent with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, reveals how her experience working in the realm of Internet freedom has contributed to her writing process. She goes on to explain how the political dissidence that featured prominently in her past reporting becomes apparent, as well, in this carefully wrought book about the changing role of social media within influential communist regimes.
