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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

    A History of the New York Times Notable Books

    For Salon, Laura Miller dug through two decades’ worth of the New York Times Notable Books to see how the list has evolved over the years.

  • P.E. Garcia

    Appropriating Rural Poverty

    We’re living in a golden decade for rural escapist fare: the latest, most extreme iteration of a cultural construct that effectively removes people living there from society’s list of concerns. The effect of these savvy new Westerns is, in some…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Human Monster

    [Julia seemed like] a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, someone who had been taught a few artistic turns, like a trained animal. [But] for the few who knew her better, she was a…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Companionship of Books

    For Words without Borders, Can Xue describes her father’s “serious books” and how having them as companions led her to a “genuine spiritual pursuit.”

  • P.E. Garcia

    Daum-isms

    Just to throw out a few other Daum-isms—here’s her description of Anthropologie: “A twirling motion in the form of an international brand”. Of Los Angeles: “a place where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other.” Of Nicole Kidman:…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Unsellable Books

    I couldn’t sell them to Chicago for landfill. Patrick Modiano was practically unknown in America until he won the Nobel Prize, but David Godine, an independent publisher, has had boxes of his books for years. The Boston Globe has a…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Disaster of the American Book Awards

    In essence, the American Book Awards are to the National Book Awards as New Coke is to Coca-Cola Classic, i.e., a complete fucking disaster, one that all parties involved would prefer to forget. The Paris Review takes a look at…

  • P.E. Garcia

    How to Write a Mouse-Washing Scene

    How does one write a mouse-washing scene? There aren’t a lot of examples in literature, and in any event I didn’t want my mouse-washing scene to be contaminated by the work of other fiction writers. For Electric Literature, Jeff Vandermeer…

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Ship that Walt Whitman Launched

    In The New Republic, Leon Wieselter explains how a line from Walt Whitman inspired the publication’s logo.

  • P.E. Garcia

    A Loss of Translation

    The mismatch between quality and recognition in the world of translated fiction and nonfiction is surely more extreme than in any category of literature, and while this category has a growing number of great advocates, it deserves to have them…

  • P.E. Garcia

    Ancient Pulp Fiction

    A new English translation of ancient Arabian stories contains monsters, jinn, and some rather promiscuous princes. Elizabeth Lowry discusses the collection and its relationship to modern pulp fiction for the Guardian.

  • P.E. Garcia

    The Private Eye Period Piece

    For a while now, such characters, if not totally extinct, have been on a steady life-support drip of nostalgia. In an age when GPS tracking, oversharing and 8 Signs Your Man Is Cheating listicles make their services unnecessary, the old-school…