Posts by author
Dawn Pier
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Of Love and Loss
For Guernica, Boyer Rickel offers us raw reflections on love and disease after losing his partner in “Morgan: A Lyric.” You don’t realize how much nothing is until you have nothing, says a woman in Oklahoma whose house burned down. Love…
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But Is It A Sin to Kill Her Agent?
In November, we posted a link to a story about To Kill a Mockingbird’s Harper Lee suing her hometown museum. But it turns out the aging author has an even bigger fish to fry in the courtroom: her literary agent who…
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Eve Ensler on the Congo, Cancer, and Connection
For Guernica, Rumpus interviewee/contributor Michael Klein interviews Eve Ensler, creator of “The Vagina Monologues” about her work in the Congo, overcoming stage-3 ovarian cancer, and reconnecting with her body, all of which is described in her new memoir In the Body of…
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Goodbye to…Earth-Shattering Sex?
The Atlantic gave the Rumpus’s own Sari Botton, Melissa Febos, Mira Ptacin, and Cheryl Strayed a chance to delve deeper into their contributions to the anthology “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York.” In a roundtable discussion with…
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The Stockholm Syndrome of Sexual Assault
For Slate, Amanda Hess examines yet another first-person confessional: sexual assault victim Jenny Kutner’s essay “The Other Side of the Story,” published in Texas Monthly. The power of Kutner’s story is that it lends insight into a particular type of victimization—the kind…
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Rockwell and the Law of Opposites
In the New Yorker, Lee Siegel sheds light on the oft-seen contradiction between artists and their art in her review of Deborah Solomon’s biography “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell.” In contrast to his idealized paintings of…
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Women Speaking Up
For Slate, Amanda Hess reports on a boom in the publication of personal essays about women’s issues like rape, abortion, or an eye-poppingly grotesque parasite infection that we’d rather remain ignorant of: These stories are emotionally electric, politically relevant, and powerfully…
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Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying on Film
Check out Joseph Entin’s even-handed review of James Franco’s movie adaptation of “As I Lay Dying” at LARB. Franco has tackled the über-challenging multi-perspective modernist piece where others demurred, and has come away with something worthy of examination, particularly by…
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The Punctuation Problem
We didn’t know there was one until Slate‘s Matthew Malady pointed out the limitations of English punctuation. Look, I’m the last one to encourage the excessive use of exclamation points. But if we are going to use them—and they do…
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Thanksgivukkah Reading
Over at WNPR this week Maureen Corrigan offers up a “Literary Escape Plan” from holiday stress. The Borsch Belt-style Pilgrim jokes and mishmash recipes (turkey brined in Manischewitz, anyone?) are flying around the Internet; but since Jews are frequently referred…
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“I am Malala” Book Banned
The LA Times reported this week that sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai’s memoir I Am Malala, has been banned from over 40,000 schools in her native country of Pakistan. The book (co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb) describes Malala’s transformation into a vocal…
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Twain’s Longest Dictation
In the New Yorker, Ben Tarnoff reviews Volume II of the Autobiography of Mark Twain. Notorious for his ability to talk a blue streak, Twain dictated the entire three-volume tome of over 5000 typewritten pages while lying in bed awaiting,…