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…
Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
356 posts
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…