Columns
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The Rumpus Book Club Interview With Matthew Specktor
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Matthew Specktor about American Dream Machine, embracing disbelief, and the impossibility of saying no to Robert DeNiro.
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“Kholden Kolfeeld’s” Russian Fans
Amid the flood of J. D. Salinger articles related to the upcoming biography and documentary about him, this New Yorker essay by Reed Johnson stands out. It has nothing to do with the biography, actually. It’s about Russian translations of The Catcher in…
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“Fear and Anxiety…Link All of Us Across the Centuries”
An excerpt from Joel F. Harrington’s book The Faithful Executioners is a featured Longreads Members Pick and well worth a few minutes of your time. Starting with a creative nonfictional account of an executioner in Germany in the 1500s, the piece…
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250,000 Books Head to the Landfill
Book lovers, avert your eyes: the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia took a quarter million books and threw them in the trash. It’s common for libraries to prune their collections, getting rid of outdated or unpopular books in favor…
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Roxane Gay Fights the Good Fight
The Los Angeles Times has a great overview of our essays editor Roxane Gay’s latest efforts to spread diversity in the publishing world: “We can’t think of gender without also considering race, class, sexuality and ability,” Gay says. “As long as…
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Lotería by Mario Alberto Zambrano
Catherine Carberry reviews Mario Alberto Zambrano’s LOTERIA today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Tales from the Shanghai Book Fair
If the expo serves as any indication, Shanghai has considerably more book enthusiasts than I had suspected, even though just a couple of days earlier The Atlantic had published an article about the decline of reading in China. For the LA…
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The Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Smithsonian looks at the very first Syrian chemical attack. Have you ever seen an albino humpback whale? It’s a pretty great thing. If any of you readers love me you’ll buy this fossilised dinosaur battle for me. The secret to…
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(Forcibly) Leaving Home Behind
In an essay from High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, retired city worker and community organizer Dolores Wilson recalls the heartbreaking process she faced after being relocated from her soon-to-be demolished public housing high rise.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Fading of September 11
We live in a world where whenever the discussion turns to humanitarian assistance or military intervention what is meant by that is American assistance and American intervention. There are good reasons for this fact. It was the United States that…
