• Libraries Aren’t Just About Books

    For Slate, Jacob Brogan suggests that despite “shrinking book racks,” libraries play an important political and social role. This is particularly true in low-income areas, as libraries provide computer access for job searchers and entrepreneurs: Libraries are powerful precisely because they’re…

  • Help Bjork Save Iceland’s Headlands

    In conjunction with the Heart of Iceland organization, Bjork is calling for an eleven-day global protest against international efforts to build power lines that would facilitate a plan to transport energy from Iceland’s volcanos to England. Read more about the…

  • Latest Salvo in Genre War

    David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, has been nominated for both “literary” and “genre” awards, putting him in a somewhat unique position to comment on the ever-raging literary vs. genre war: “It’s convenient to have a science…

  • War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians

    War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians

    Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.

  • Love Letters and the Long Con

    This is a story is about a con that unfolded very slowly over two decades. When the con was finally exposed, some of the victims defended the people who had been fooling them. They preferred to believe the lie. NPR’s…

  • Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #9: We Shall Overcome?

    Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #9: We Shall Overcome?

    Last year on our way to and from getting married in New Orleans, my now husband and I went on a civil rights pilgrimage. We went to Montgomery and Birmingham; we went to Selma. We drove the Pettus Bridge there…

  • Notable San Francisco: 11/11–11/17

    Wednesday 11/11: Poets Martin Corless-Smith (Nota) and Rebecca Wolff (founder and publisher of Fence Books and “The Constant Critic” website) read from their latest collections. Free, 7:30 p.m., Green Apple Books On The Park. “Facets of Spirituality Poetry Series” presents novelist…

  • In The Beginning

    From award-winning indies like Graywolf and Copper Canyon, to the fresh crop of young presses like Yes Yes Books and Topside Press, every press begins with just one book. It can start at a kitchen table or at a pinball…

  • The “Myth” Of Dead Young Writers

    At the New York Times, Dana Stevens and Benjamin Moser debate whether or not we romanticize writers who die young. While Moser argues that we should not remember a writer for his death, Stevens admits that she is attracted to the “mythic…

  • Alliance and Condemnation by Claudio Rodriguez

    Alliance and Condemnation by Claudio Rodriguez

    Barbara Berman reviews Claudio Rodriguez’s Alliance and Condemnation, translated by Philip Silver, today in Rumpus Poetry.

  • Oh, Canada

    “I love that Justin Trudeau has a literature degree,” says Heather O’Neill. “We need a literary imagination to run the country.” In a conversation with Lit Hub, Montreal-based writer Heather O’Neill, author of a new short story collection titled Daydreams of…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Rick Moody

    The Rumpus Interview with Rick Moody

    Rick Moody talks about the newly collected writings of the elusive Reginald Edward Morse, Hotels of North America, and why fiction in general ought to lie more.