Posts by author
Charley Locke
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How to Fill Your Literary Prescription and Cure Your Existential Ailments
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of…
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Would You Rather Babysit Cathy Ames or Christine Hargensen?
What do Yukio Mishima, Tana French, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck have in common? They’re the masterminds behind a couple of the most evil fictional youngsters of all time, according to a list compiled by British bookstore Abebooks. The list…
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Ursula Le Guin Eschews Amazon in Favor of Healthy Diet
Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is. I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes…
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How Quiet Lightning Struck San Francisco
I felt the bios and intros depleted the magic. Each sequence of words is a spell, and when you follow one spell with another spell, they compound, building off the energy of the previous spell. It reinforces the inherent value…
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Dante’s Horoscope: A Long, Prose-Filled Journey
This year marks Dante’s 750th birthday. But on what date should The Rumpus host our purgatorio-themed party? More importantly, what was Dante’s zodiac sign? If you’re a fastidious reader of The Divine Comedy and your horoscope, you should know the…
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Authors Dish on Their First Time
As a first time novelist, I thought it would be fun to read what people had said about my book [on Amazon]… One of them said that it read like an MFA exercise. And that really hurt, because it was…
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Roxane Gay on NYT’s Alabaster Summer Reading List
“Another day, another all-white list of recommended reading.” So begins a piece on NPR from Roxane Gay on the New York Times’s newly released summer reading list, which features zero authors of color. Gay argues that national outlets with wide-ranging audiences,…
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On Getting Pranked by Philip Roth
Philip Roth’s retirement may well go down in history as one of the literary world’s greatest pranks. Over at The Baffler, J.C. Hallman takes a look at whether the literary giant has actually retired, despite giving interviews and and participating…
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A File Folder of Insults from Mom
I’m so mean-spirited. I wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them. So explains Sally Mann, photographer and author of recent memoir Hold Still, who goes through some old boxes at Book Page, from uncovering family…
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Gary Shteyngart on the Feast of Ravelstein
When I assign Herzog to my students, I am essentially bringing a slab of foie gras to a vegan party. While author Gary Shteyngart won’t blurb your book, he did agree to write a new introduction to Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein.…
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How to Buy Heidi Julavits’s Self on eBay
Author Heidi Julavits’s predominant self is hiding inside this matryoshka doll. Over at the Paris Review, in an interview with Leanne Shapton, Julavits answers each question with an eBay auction listing. What listing would you choose to answer the query, “What…
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United Offers Elite Lit Mag of the Skies
What do authors Anthony Doerr, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, and Rick Moody have in common? While The Rumpus is tickled to have featured these illustrious authors within our pages, we can’t say we’ve offered them the opportunity to be read…