Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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A Parenthetical Suffering
According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” (and to discover that there’s an…
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Memory Loss
These days, memorization, like corporal punishment, is something our culture has largely evolved beyond. We might all know the first verse of Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but beyond that it’s hit and miss. In the age of search…
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No One Hears the Wars in Your Head. Except You.
I worked the same way with alcohol and drugs, and my whiskey elves, my beasts, never disappointed. I mean, they didn’t always write the prettiest prose — cocaine isn’t known to instill poetry — but they usually unearthed interesting images…
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The Beats and Their Women
While their politics and art were radical and dangerous for their time, the Beat Generation’s views toward women were not that much different than those of the man in the grey flannel suit they rebelled against. Women played an important…
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Just Another Sap in the Night
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death, Colson Whitehead’s new memoir about his participation in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, will be out on May 6th. NPR just published an excerpt: After a few phone calls, the administration released…
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No Reading Necessary
Literary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward…
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Remembering Venice Beach
Rumpus author Ruth Fowles has a new feature out on Guernica in which she remembers her days spent in Venice Beach. If this was fiction, I would make sure that each of my characters were rewarded with love or sex or…
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A Literature of Concussions
In the Super Bowl weekend, Rumpus author Sebastian Sockman writes a long essay on Los Angeles Review of Books about the controversial story of severe traumas within the NFL and all the books that dealt with that topic. The helmet — the…
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Going Back to Her Roots
I said that my family was originally from a tiny village called Antopol, a few hours from Minsk, in Belarus. “But no one’s heard of it,” I said. “You can’t even find it on a map She set down the…
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A Werewolf Writer
Experiments and challenges keep things fresh and exciting, keep me from getting caught in a rut. I also work on many different projects at once. I’ll mess around with the novel and then break from it to write a short…
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Grammar Master David Foster Wallace
The interview was a byproduct of an article Wallace started in the late nineties on the grammar wars. Most writers think of grammar as uninteresting, the machine code of literature, but Wallace loved it for many reasons—because his mother did;…