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P.E. Garcia

P.E. Garcia is an Editor-at-Large for the Rumpus and a contributor to HTMLGiant. They currently live in Philadelphia, where they were recently accidentally elected to be Judge of Elections. Find them on Twitter: @AvantGarcia.
  • P.E. Garcia

    How a Writer Became a Carpenter

    After producing a “listicle” of the “World’s 100 Unsexiest Men,” Nina McLaughlin decided her writing career hadn’t turned out how she had hoped. So she became a carpenter. NPR has more.

  • P.E. Garcia

    Tax Advice from David Foster Wallace

    “Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and the consent of the governed built in,” Wallace wrote in an email to his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen,…

  • P.E. Garcia

    Ancient Advice on Getting Old

    When it comes to offering tips for those growing old, apart from sitting on the sofa thinking smugly about all your great achievements, Cicero recommends taking up agriculture. For The Spectator, Richard Ingrams reviews Tom Payne’s The Ancient  Art of…

  • P.E. Garcia

    Sexy, Scandalous Science

    For centuries the study of flowers and the cultivation of gardens were deemed to be safe pursuits for genteel young ladies – providing they did not aspire to become professional botanists…Carl Linnaeus’s sexual system for the classification of plants, based…

  • P.E. Garcia

    Missing Bones Found

    Back in 2012, Electric Literature featured a piece about the search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Now scientists in Spain say they’ve found his bones.

  • P.E. Garcia

    Surviving Success

    Joyce relentlessly made things more and more difficult for readers, as if success actually prevented him from producing more of the same, so determined was he to be nobody’s servant. Hence the lucid and fluent Dubliners becomes the more difficult…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Best Year in Literature

    Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for books ever.” The Guardian wonders, though, what other years could…

  • P.E. Garcia

    I, Twitterbot

    At the New York Review of Books, James Gleick says that the future promised in novels like I, Robot is already here—in the form of Twitterbots.

  • P.E. Garcia

    A Weird History

    When we say “in a weird way” now, we often are letting you know: I recognize that what I am about to say may seem unclear, impressionistic, or strange; I haven’t completely sorted it out — and I am trying…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Original Copycat

    Tim Youd has recently undertaken the task of reproducing Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, but the Guardian says the idea of copying classic novels is not so original; Pierre Menard, a character in a Borges story, did it first: Although the words themselves…

  • P.E. Garcia

    A Sincere Mustache

    In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I…

  • P.E. Garcia

    A Formula for Imagination

    At the Ploughshares blog, Lara Palmquist discusses Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (The Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, a collective of mathematicians and writers who have been creating works of literature from self-imposed restrictions and formulas since 1960.