Posts by author
Jessie Wood
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‘Third Gender’ Caveman Discovered
Archaeologists digging in a 5,000 year old grave have found a “third gender” caveman. The man was buried in the style of a woman, and because of the culture’s strict adherence to their burial laws, it is assumed that he…
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“Plenty of Sorrow to Go Round”
William T. Vollman critiques John Sayles’ A Moment in the Sun, a new novel from McSweeney’s about racism at home and imperialism abroad in turn of the twentieth century America.
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Inspecting the Legacy of David Foster Wallace
Monday, we linked to Andrew Altschul’s essay on DFW’s story “The Suffering Channel.” The piece is part of The Quarterly Conversation‘s “symposium on David Foster Wallace,” a collection of in-depth analysis of Wallace’s works, thoughts, and beliefs: Scott Esposito explains…
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BookCourt Profile
One of our favorite independent Brooklyn bookstores, BookCourt, is focused on keeping people interested in reading and buying physical, tangible books. Of course, no matter how well a bookstore is doing these days, it could always be doing better, so…
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“Notes From a Literary Apprenticeship”
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, writes in the New Yorker about her path to becoming a writer. A first generation American whose parents were from India, Lahiri had to somehow reconcile those two drastically different…
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The Optimism of Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall speaks with Bill Moyers about the work she has done, not just with chimpanzees, but with creating a better world for our children and grandchildren to live in.
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“Thoughts on ‘The Suffering Channel,’ Reality, and Shit”
An essay by Andrew Altschul, the Books editor here at The Rumpus, examines the David Foster Wallace story “The Suffering Channel,” ruminating on art versus shit, shit as art, the effects of reality television on personal insignificance and authenticity, and the…
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A Gun By Any Other Name…
Letters of Note has posted an exchange between Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and a Geoffrey Boothroyd, a gun expert. Boothroyd had taken offense in Bond’s “rather deplorable taste in firearms,” and written a letter to Fleming expressing…
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Jewcy Lorin Stein
In a recent interview Lorin Stein discusses the Jewish realm of literature, from Leonard Michaels and Saul Bellow to the contemporary writers Sam Lipsyte, David Bezmozgis and Joshua Cohen, what it means to be Jewish in today’s literary world as…
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Joe Sacco
The Believer magazine sat down with comic journalist Joe Sacco to talk about his book Footnotes in Gaza, his creative process, the unique value of comic journalism, and illustration versus photography.
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Aggressive Didion
A snippet of an old Joan Didion interview with Tom Brokaw surfaced on Twitter recently. Asked if she becomes a different person when sitting at the typewriter, Didion says it makes her feel completely in control over the “tiny, tiny…