Posts by author
Casey Dayan
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The Day Everyone Laughed
Think Wilde, Wodehouse, Carroll, Cervantes—comedy has a thousand-year-old affair with literature. That said, what makes people laugh is as elusive and surprising as it is fascinating. Have you heard of the 1962 Tanganyika laughter epidemic? We’re here in East Africa…
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What We Can’t Say
You know the feeling perfectly. You’re at an interview. The manager clears his throat, says, “Tell us a bit about some of your strengths.” Despite the facts that he repeatedly calls you juggernaut, you feel an undying, writerly urge to…
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Twelve Years, One Book Later
Another testament to the tribulations of novel-making: over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma discusses the particular technical problems he faced while writing Family Life as well as how, exactly, he went about solving them. The book took twelve and a…
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Jane Austen Would Be Eating Top Ramen Too
With writers, it’s usually neither rags to riches nor riches to rags. Marx had Engels, Austen had her family. Read this and rest assured: some cool people lived with their parents. Austen didn’t start out rich and she never got…
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Art Undying, Georgia O’Beef Stew
Open mics, poetry contests, theatre prospects—a small “Art Bar” in Santa Cruz, California is using art, beer, and uniquely named food to fund local arts education. On its busiest days, the Tannery is a warren of studios featuring painters, sculptors,…
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Discovered: Aesop Manuscript
Fine, you caught us: it’s a McSweeney’s thing. In one sense, these mock-Aesop fables show just how untranslatable the morality of antiquity is to the modern, post-Enlightenment subject. In another sense, they’re just plain funny. When the winter came, the…
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On Dying, from the Heart
Over at The Weeklings, find an excerpt from Sean Murphy’s book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone: A Memoir of My Mother. You learn not to talk to the stars, or you eventually realize it’s senseless to hope they…
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Tricks and Tropes of the Trade
Though it may never be nominated for an Oscar, the contemporary ad has unarguably become a genre of its own. Over at McSweeney’s, Kendra Eash pokes fun at some of the genre’s tricks and tropes. See how this guy in…
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The Perfect Body
In this essay, Larissa Pham gives her readers a clear look into the nitty gritty details of her childhood. In Southeast Asia, as in ballet, femininity is quiet, graceful, small, and strong. There are certain conventions: my Vietnamese mother kept…
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Budding Sexuality with Jehovah’s Witnesses
If you’ve read and liked Nick Cave Monday, take a look at this interview with Tony DuShane about his novel Jesus Jerks, a semi-autobiographical work about his coming of age in a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The experiences of the…
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On a Tethered Sexuality
Fortifying the old adage “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,” Rumpus intern Ashley Perez wrote an article for The Weeklings about her sexual unfolding. It begins with mental shackles and ends with physical ones. The pain, the embarrassment…
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Is the Essay like Reality TV?
In an article about the contemporary form of the essay, Adam Kirsch states, “The new essay is exclusively about the self with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory.” This article compares essayists such as Rothbart and Crosley…