• Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

    It’s a Friday so how about we all read Andrew Bujalski’s unified theory of Rocky. Your gut is, like, so strange. More unbuilt things: Frei Otto’s Arctic City. From inside the 17th Century dead letter archives. We all need some…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Elisabeth Egan

    The Rumpus Interview with Elisabeth Egan

    Elisabeth Egan discusses her debut novel, A Window Opens, life as a book lover, workplace jargon, and the question we should ask ourselves in place of can we “have it all”.

  • Living with the Cloud

    How did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral—all vapor and crystal? The New Yorker explores how the metaphor of “the cloud” is shaping how we experience the Internet.

  • Writers and Running

    Nick Ripatrazone on why writers need to run: While on sabbatical in London in 1972, a homesick Oates began running “compulsively; not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing.” At the same time,…

  • ?uestlove’s Rivalry with Finding Nemo

    With Finding Dory, the sequel to the Pixar hit, coming to theaters soon, ?uestlove has been inspired to recount a Nemo-related anecdote: apparently, one time Prince fired the artist from a DJ gig, and replaced him by just screening Finding…

  • Author Dislikes Bad Review

    A self-published British author disliked the online review left on Amazon by a Scottish teenager. His response was to travel the 500 miles from London to find her in a grocery store and hit her over the head with a…

  • Raymond Chandler’s Writing Legacy

    What greater prestige can a man like me (not too greatly gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other…

  • The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York

    The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York

    But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.

  • Song of the Day: “California”

    In a recent interview with the Guardian, Claire Boucher describes her song “California” as “kind of shitty.” Via her stage name, Grimes, Boucher has released an eclectic and not-at-all-“shitty” catalogue of hybrid dance pop that has seized the attention of critics and listeners…

  • An Interview with Ross Gay

    Kaveh Akbar’s interview with author Ross Gay is delightfully honest. Gay, who is an author of three books: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, invites us into his world by sharing backstories about some of his work. I felt really…

  • Notable Portland: 11/12–11/18

    Thursday 11/12: Mary Jo Bang reads from her acclaimed poetry as part of this semester’s visiting writers series at Reed College. Eliot Chapel, 6:30 p.m., free. Scott Nadelson celebrates the release of his new novel, Between You and Me, with…

  • The Whiteness of Literary Events

    It’s daunting knowing that you will be the only one of your kind at some of these events. When you’ve been made to feel your otherness so concretely in the past, it’s hard not to notice it. I can’t help…