2014
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Notable Chicago: 12/19–12/25
Friday 12/19: Bad Grammar Theater is back at Powell’s Bookstore University Village for another evening of readings from Chicago authors of horror, fantasy, pulp fiction, and sci-fi. 6 p.m. Monday 12/22: Women and Children First hosts award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl, who’ll…
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Fetishizing Cuba
For The New Republic, Ryan Kearney responds to those claiming that American tourism and investment will ruin Cuba’s romanticism: If you visit Cuba to puff cigars, get drunk on rum-and-cokes or mojitos, read Hemingway, and fetishize the country’s dilapidation with your…
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Making Real People into Fiction
If you have a story that you want to tell, but you’re afraid that someone in your life is going to feel wounded, whether that feeling is justified or not, fair or not, tell it anyway. For Rookie, author Emma…
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Not-So-Young Adults
Good news! Early reports show that book sales are up 4.9 percent in 2014. Who can we thank for this Christmas miracle? Adults who read e-book versions of YA novels, that’s who. Sales are up by a dramatic 53 percent…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
The Big Picture’s year in reviews are one of my favorite things about making it through another twelve months. Elsewhere in year-ending lists: 2014 in record breaking feats. They know it’s Christmas in space. Asking the important questions: what happens…
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The Rumpus Interview with Frederick Barthelme
Frederick Barthelme talks about his new novel, There Must Be Some Mistake, life after teaching, and why food from the Olive Garden is “execrable in the best possible way.”
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Next Letter in the Mail: Erica Ehrenberg
We’re getting ready to send out our next Letter in the Mail, and it’s from Erica Ehrenberg! Erica writes to us about her connection with her grandmother, wondering how much she actually knows and how much is imagined, ultimately asking the question, How…
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Public Domain Has It
My heart pounded and my breath choked in my windpipe. I had stumbled on an accidental mention of a totally unfamiliar race. Obviously non-Terrestrial. Yet, to the characters in the book, it was perfectly natural—which suggested they belonged to the…
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Reserved for the Dead and Dignified
For the New Yorker’s “Inner Worlds,” Colum McCann writes about his father’s writing shed, and Teju Cole shares his experience of watching (and rewatching) Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Red.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Edward Hirsch
Dean Rader talks with Edward Hirsch about his new book Gabriel, the pain of losing a child, and the challenges of writing grief.
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Song of the Day: “Merry Christmas Baby”
Merry Christmas baby You sure do treat me nice Soul icon Otis Redding’s short career was remarkably prolific. The highlights from his electrifying catalog are varied and buoyant, even in an area of pop music that has traditionally suffered from…
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Good Writing and Bad Surveillance
The idea of “good writing” is shaped by social forces—that are in turn shaped by economic and historical forces—and our own identity privileges and privileges as editors (if we are editors). Determining what is good or bad is an aesthetic…