John Wraith’s Penis
“John Wraith’s penis is a neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, and is central to every plot twist in the book.” Max Ross reviews Alistair Morgan’s Sleeper’s…
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Rumpus Articles
The Last Book I Loved: The Feverhead
I’m a promiscuous lover of books. I treat each one as if it’s the only—there will never be another after, there were none before. This is the last book I read and the last book I loved.
Jonathan Lethem and [insert marijuana pun here]
Jonathan Lethem talks to the LA Times Book Jacket about his new novel Chronic City in an interview by Carolyn Kellogg. The interview covers the character development of Perkus Tooth,…
Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #6: The Fruit Standkeeper, Wroclaw
(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995) The Fruit Standkeeper, Wroclaw His hands are a thing of beauty, long, thick fingers moving in webs grazing apples and…
Willa A. Cmiel: The Last Short Story I Loved, “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea”
I read J.M.G Le Clézio’s “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea” over the course of an average day—during meals, on the subway, during slow periods at work—and was…
Hear That? That’s the Sound of Someone Reading to You
I remember all the nights I spent tucked into bed with my other sisters and our mother perched on the end of the bed reading Goodnight Moon to us. Those…
Morning Coffee
The number of universes out there may depend on the human brain! Sometimes trees fall into your house, and that is ok. I’m certainly not the biggest fan of car…
Equinox Oral Histories: “I Can Do This On My Own”
As part of Daniel Nester’s English 251: Interviews and Oral History class, students took trips down to Equinox, a community services center in downtown Albany, New York, to interview some…
Fighting the Thousand Year War
Praveen Mavdan and Christin Evans, owners for the past two years of the Booksmith in San Francisco, are writing a series of weekly articles on the Huffington Post about their…
Reviewing The Reviewers
“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews…
The Beauty Of Black Sparrow Books
The love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things. If I loved to read as much as I loved…