Walking Along Brighton Beach
As soon as Ashley came down the stairs from the subway, which rattles across a bridge over Brighton Beach Avenue, it all came tumbling out: who he really was and…
Giving Up The Giver
What is it like to hand your award-winning young adult novel over to Hollywood, 21 years after it was written? Lois Lowry talks to the New York Times about the forthcoming film…
The Rumpus Interview with Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block discusses her passion for writing twenty-five years after her iconic debut, Weetzie Bat, her propensity for hypergraphia, and the value of a supportive editor.
For Sale: John Cheever’s Magical Suburban Home
Alexander Nazaryan’s Newsweek essay about John Cheever’s home (for sale, in Ossining) is more than a real estate ad; it’s a beautiful homage to the suburbanite writer. Upon touring the house with…
Short Stories for Aliens
Do aliens, once in love, ever break up? You’d have to hope so. It would be kind of creepy, all these aliens living monogamously to like age 9,000, making love…
Away, But Not Away
How can writers get a room of their own, literally or figuratively? In Away, an essay in the summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Roxana Robinson writes about carving out private space…
Roger Angell Nation
When you read Roger Angell, you can (it’s cheesy, but true!) smell clover and hear the crack of a baseball against a baseball bat. Angell is synonymous with baseball writing,…
Turned Out I Wanted A Snack
In the newest installment of the Believer‘s interview series, What Would Twitter Do?, Sheila Heti interviews the reigning queen of Twitter, Patricia Lockwood. Patricia breaks down Pie Dough Disease: when pie dough…
Zadie Smith: Pathological Reader
In Oprah, the author writes that her consumption of books may be absurd, but that, at least, summer is a good time to have pathological reading habits. I would like to say…
140 Keystrokes
It’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent…
90% More Prose
Calling all T.S Eliot nerds (or, just nerds): nearly 90% of Eliot’s prose has been unavailable or out-out-print; this year, Ronald Schuchard is publishing the first out of his eight-volume work,…
The Poetry of Power Tools
Dan Piepenbring writes at the Paris Review about the universe inside industrial-supply catalogs, which offer a different kind of poetry to readers: And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a…