Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Like Butter on Toast
The Butter, The Toast’s new vertical run by Rumpus Essays Editor Emeritus Roxane Gay, has just launched. To present her latest venture, Gay wrote a Butter FAQ, stretching, in her typical style, from submission guidelines (spoiler: no guidelines!) to Nick Jonas,…
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A Century of Dylan Thomas
“Dylan is very emotional but like a good Welshman also very suspicious. Thus when he has expressed himself very warmly, in fact exposed himself, he will suddenly react violently towards a self-sneering cynicism.” Dylan Thomas would have turned 100 a…
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A Place (Not) For Reading
Reading a book is wholly antithetical to the purpose of a bar. The purpose of a bar is to socialize, be it with friends, lovers, potential lovers or complete strangers. Sean Manning is endorsing quite an unpopular position over at…
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Figuring 101 Two-Letter Words
Stephin Merritt, besides being the lead singer/songwriter in beloved indie band Magnetic Fields, is a talented poet. His latest collection of short poems is a trip into the world of two-letter words allowed on Scrabble. Merritt shares the stories behind…
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Being Michael Crichton
I didn’t know it while I was flaunting his books throughout my elementary school, but forty years earlier Crichton had lived out my dreams of childhood achievement. Over at The Millions, Jared Young confesses his early age obsession with Michael…
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Women in (Science) Fiction
2014 may not have been an especially good year for female writers in general, but it apparently saw a rise in prizes and accolades for women writing science fiction. Unfortunately, this is but a small step forward toward gender equality…
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The New Proust
I’m a Proustian in that sense, I believe in memories outside of consciousness, and this is just a way to find them. Writing is a way to get access to them. The thing you feel if you smell something, or…
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Propitiated Reading
What I as a young enthusiast took for pell-mell freedom and chaos is in fact the result of careful orchestration and staging, within individual stories and in terms of the collection as a whole. This doesn’t mean the work is…
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Remembering Galway Kinnell
Poet Galway Kinnell sadly passed away a few days ago. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books a group of authors—including, among others, Dana Levin and Natalie Diaz—pay homage to his great life and career, and recollect how his poetry influenced…
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(Not Really) Pleased To Meet You
The narrative of the encounter between James Joyce and Marcel Proust gets another tile added to its mosaic. Over at the London Review of Books blog, Ben Jackson reports on the legendary meeting as told by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife…
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The Book of Love
“For a certain sort of person, sharing a book can be as intimate and exhilarating as sharing a kiss,” writes Helen Rosner in her moving essay about books, love and relationships over at BuzzFeed Books.
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Burnt and Found
[Lowry] spent a decade working on In Ballast to the White Sea, but the draft was lost when his shack near Vancouver in Canada burned down in 1944. However, it has transpired that Lowry had given an early copy to his…