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Seth Fischer

Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.
  • Seth Fischer

    In Israel, Literary Authors Report the News

    Last Wednesday, in honor of Hebrew Book Week, the Israeli daily Haaretz sent its journalists home one day and brought in a bunch of literary authors to report the news. Apparently, it worked brilliantly. The weather report was a poem about summer.…

  • Seth Fischer

    Punk Rock Explained

    I have an admission to make. I’m one of those people who changes the subject whenever punk rock comes up. Don’t get me wrong. I like the music. But I refuse to memorize the name of the Sex Pistols’ first bassist,…

  • Seth Fischer

    Is Your Novel Autobiographical?

    Academics spend their careers studying how autobiographical novels are. Readers spend hours obsessing over it. But in a brief interview with The New Yorker’s Book Bench, Aleksandar Hemon may have answered the age old question about whether his novel is…

  • Seth Fischer

    The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup

    Sometimes, the book blogs seem resigned to the idea that we’re entering some terrible dystopia, shaking their heads sadly as the businesspeople in charge douse the future in gasoline and dance around with a matchbook in their mouths. No longer.…

  • Seth Fischer

    The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement

    Summer is coming.  What will you be reading? Will it be that Henry James novel you’ve meant to read since 1987 or that book with the vampire-zombies with tantalizing unmentionables?

  • Seth Fischer

    Welcome to Sunday

  • Seth Fischer

    Why Does No One Write About Their Day Job?

    In a manifesto (er, “ideas piece”) about the importance of the workplace in writing, Alain de Botton calls on contemporary writers to write about work. “If a proverbial alien landed on earth,” he says, “and tried to figure out what human…

  • Seth Fischer

    “Sonnet like allusions are made to your gilt silk hair”

    Next week, 600,000 pages of manuscripts, letters, drafts and journals will be put online from canonical British authors like Oscar Wilde, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and others. Included will be correspondence between Wilde and many of his lovers, including…

  • Seth Fischer

    Even the Future Has Gone to Shit

    Over at TOR, Robert Charles Wilson compares ABC’s new Earth 2100 documentary to Disney’s 1955 program Man in Space in order to trace how our vision of the future has changed.  “Earth 2100 … is more dismaying than Man in Space, the way…

  • Seth Fischer

    This Book Stinks

    Apparently,  Marina Fiorato’s new novel The Madonna of the Almonds has a complementary perfume designed to smell like Renaissance Italy, the setting of her book. This strikes me as either ingenius or idiotic —probably both— and may just be another reminder…

  • Seth Fischer

    The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup

    It is spring, and the book blogs are horny! Will they be the type to lock themselves in a room with a suitcase full of porn? Or will they find someone who looks lonely and hit on them, not leaving…

  • Seth Fischer

    The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement

    This week, Rumpus Books has published reviews of Christopher Buckley’s new memoir, the work of Sidney Wade, and two novels, including one about being Jewish  — and accused of patricide — in Holocaust-era Austria.