Seth Fischer

“Compared to El Salvador, Nicaragua was like playing jacks. The two countries were nothing alike. El Salvador was your basic mail-order military dictatorship: terror and torture, stuttering civilians. Nicaragua was more like a cheerful communist kazoo concert.” The Believer has…

“It’s a daring idea,” says David Senior, a MoMA bibliographer and friend, “because some of our books smell really bad.”” A woman in New York is smelling all 300,000 books in the MoMA library and writing ab0ut it in pencil…

Because it’s now the future, everything is about technology today! Kyle Minor is over at GIANT talking about the Kindle. Publishers are giving kids advanced copies of books and asking them what they think. (via) David Ulin talks about how…

Happy New Year from The Rumpus!  

“Why can’t the books we come across at thirty, or forty, or fifty, affect us in quite the same way as the book about the children who were turned into flying mice that we read when we were eight?” I…

“A reader might feel, at first, “Ah, I see, this story is making a social commentary—that’s why it exists,” and then, while she’s distracted, the story does … something else. Hopefully something a little more…” — A great interview with George…

Holiday time is a pretty good time to hole up in the den and catch up on Rumpus Books, especially if you have a den.

I’ve been in love with Project Gutenberg for most of my adult life.  Since 1971, they’ve been putting copyright-free books into computers (many of them classics) for anyone to read. It’s gotten me through my fair share of boring jobs.…

I feel like quoting people today … “He is a writer. I think P and I fell into our own semantic trap, and romanticized him. Writers are fine, sensitive beings, aware of the world, the inner tensions, alert, inquiring, and…