The Rumpus Interview with Mary Roach
Mary Roach discusses Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, the rigors of interviewing aerospace administrators, and why that process nearly caused her to abandon the book entirely.
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Mike Scalise
5 posts
Mike Scalise's essays and articles have appeared in Agni, Post Road, Ninth Letter, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Southampton writers conferences and was most recently the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
In Packing for Mars, Mary Roach matches her curiosity and humor against government secrecy, drunken Russian cosmonauts, and free-floating turds.
The Shaking Woman
Siri Hustvedt’s memoir is a sprawling exploration of memory and the ways trauma manifests in physical illness—less Mary Karr, more Oliver Sacks.
An Inside Passage
Kurt Caswell’s award-winning essays channel Phillip Lopate and David Foster Wallace, while exploring the plight of a “mountain man” stuck in a paved-over world.