Posts by author
Charley Locke
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The National Book of America, According to Borges
The English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person. Or, in Goethe’s case, we have the Germans who are easily roused to…
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I’ll Have an Everlasting Gobstopper With My Big Mac, Please
Young British bibliophiles may have found the Golden Ticket. In a six-week campaign backed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), McDonald’s will offer chapters from Roald Dahl’s books with its Happy Meals. The Rumpus would choose Matilda over a Lego…
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, Comic Book Nerd
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “The Case for Reparations,” Between the World and Me, and, most recently, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” will continue highlighting the societal problems faced by young African-American men in his new work…
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Humpty Dumpty, the Original Mansplainer
I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented yet. No, that’s not the obnoxious guy from your Wallace Stevens seminar—that’s Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, explaining “Jabberwocky” to Alice. Let Evan Kindley…
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Valeria Luiselli’s Book Club at the Jumex Factory
To write her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli got ongoing book club feedback from workers at the Jumex factory featured in the novel. Over at Broadly, Luiselli talks to Lauren Oyler about her process, a childhood…
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Mary Karr, Queen of the Memoir, on that “Low-Rent Form”
I stopped putting things in quotation marks because I really wanted the reader to continue to understand or believe or think that he or she was in my head. Listen up as Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club, Cherry,…
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Poet Laureate Grew Up a Migrant Worker, Seeing Poetry All Around Him
Those are some deep landscapes of mountains and grape fields and barns and tractors; families gathering at night to have little celebrations in the mountains and aquamarine lakes way down below. So, see, all that is like living in literature…
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Those Who Dwell Under New York
A consequence of darkness is mystery. The farther underground I went, the more mysterious the people became. More over at Lit Hub from Colum McCann about getting to know the thousands of people who once lived in the tunnels under Manhattan.
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Marilynne Robinson on Being an American
When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. Marilynne Robinson, author…
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Fifty Shades of Gray Bonnets
Whether readers are motivated by a hazy Luddism or a nostalgia for the old male-supremacist order of things, there’s no mistaking the potent commercial lure of the “bonnet books.” Over at The Baffler, Ann Neumann chronicles the strange genre of…
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The Last Essay
In Oliver Sacks’s last published essay, he writes about a patient who underwent surgery to take away his seizures caused by Klüver-Bucy syndrome—and left him with an insatiable appetite: for blocks of cheese, playing the piano, and child pornography. Read…
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I Get My Favorite Short Stories From the CIA
The Kenyon Review. Mundo Nuevo. The Paris Review. Check out whether you’ve been unknowingly colluding with secret agents whilst reading your favorite lit mags. Patrick Iber writes, “The CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the…