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…
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Guia Cortassa
474 posts
Guia Cortassa was born, lives, and works in Milan, Italy. After working as a Contemporary Art curator, she went back to writing. She is a contributing editor for Ondarock and her writing has appeared on Rivista Studio, Flair and the Quietus. She compulsively tweets @gcmorvern.
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 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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
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…