Posts by author
Michelle Dean
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Saturday History Lessons: On Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot
One February night in T.S. Eliot’s mid-twenties, he went his aunt’s house in Boston. It was 1913, and the occasion was one of those delightful-sounding “evenings of amateur theatricals” that no one bothers with anymore. (It’s a tradition that really…
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A Saturday Rumpus Index For the Conspicuously Old
I spent my 20s dilly-dallying, not-publishing, so sure of rejection by MFA programs that I never applied. So I am always happy to find new examples of people who did not start publishing until later in life. Until after, say, the…
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Adrienne Rich: “Every Mind Resides In A Body”
One of the more curious themes of the coverage of Adrienne Rich’s death this week is that people seem to want to rescue her from her political beliefs. David Orr’s piece in the New York Times today is representative of that,…
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Reading Where You Do Not Belong
Somehow I’d never heard of Sylvia Townsend Warner until the New Yorker posted its fiction podcast this week, which is Colm Toìbìn reading one of Warner’s stories. In my life, the consequence of discovering a forgotten writer like Warner is…
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Saturday History Lessons: That Time Wallace Stevens Punched Hemingway
Truth be told I don’t like macho posturing in literary feuds — or rather, the only thing I like about it is the opportunity it provides me to practice the fine art of eye-rolling. Oh, and the particular thrill to…
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On Ann Patchett on the Sexual Revolution
So look, Ann Patchett’s writing is great and the Sexual Revolution is great and I think everyone should be in favour of birth control because really, why not? But I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s…
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I Hereby Volunteer To Write Ryan Gosling’s First Novel
I’m going to break the Rumpus rule against pop culture here for a minute. (Hell, it’s Saturday.) It’s only to note Gwyneth Paltrow’s complaint, this week, that the New York Times was incorrect in its report that Paltrow used a ghostwriter…
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You Can’t Handle the Truth, in More Ways Than One
Perhaps you listened to the recent “This American Life” episode about conditions in the Apple-contractor Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen. It was voiced by a man named Mike Daisey, who had written a theatre piece called The Agony and the Ecstasy…
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Elizabeth Taylor Nerd Patrol
I am a book nerd but I tend to read old books more often than new ones. Sometimes that means I miss out on the new hot thing but more often it means I’m reading an old thing and thinking,…
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“The Literary Establishment”
The post I’d planned first for you this Rumpus Saturday keeps growing and growing and growing, like Violet Beauregarde in the Wonka factory. I need to hack at it a little. It will have to wait. Meanwhile, courtesy of the…
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Confidence Women
Because I read the internet and because I have a stake in the question, I suppose, like everyone else I’ve been thinking about women and writing. There are new byline statistics to share, this time mostly from online sites. (Though…
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Six Books and Cheetos
There were, apparently, only six books in Jeanette Winterson’s house, growing up. And she managed to become one of the world’s greatest writers, anyway. (So says I.) I can’t decide whether that’s comforting or not. I had more than six…