Columns
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Chats With Random Men #5: Rajendra
This week Alina randomly chats with a Nepali poet: 11:07 pm Rajendra Hi madam 11:07 pm Alina Hello sir
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John Knight: The Last Book I Loved, Eros the Bittersweet
You’ve got to be good to write about love. You’ve got to be really good. Most of the time, when love is the task, a writer just gets carried away recycling impossible words and ends up a sap. Not Anne Carson.
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The Creative Impulse: A Duet of Sorts
There is a romantic idea that great genius emanates from the tower. The novelist, the philosopher, the architect, all retreat to their places of solitude to channel their minds and await inspiration. A few hours, days, months, years later, they…
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Culture Death Match #2: Tom Bissell vs. Sarah Vowell
Culture Death Match pits Salvatore Pane against Amy Whipple in a point, counter-point battle royal. Today’s bout has them discussing the merits of Tom Bissell’s “Grand Thefts” and Sarah Vowell’s “Ike Was a Handsome Man”. Both essays are about obsessions,…
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Close to “Highbrow” and “Brilliant”
Well would you look at that, the Rumpus Book Club‘s September pick, Lan Samantha Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, made The New York Magazine Approval Matrix.
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Something That Can Never Be Said with Words
The darkness in Jon Fosse’s work is that of human consciousness confronted with mortality. Yet his characters seem to radiate with a luminous urgency.
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Jake Cline: The Last Book I Loved, Mother Night
If he had not been such a pacifist, Kurt Vonnegut would have made a hell of a boxer. I say this knowing full well that Vonnegut was not an impressive physical specimen. His posture was miserable, his countenance was haggard…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
The future is now! Spray on fabric. Oh no, but that’s a common misconception. (via Gerry Canavan.) Birds on a wire as musical notation (there is a surprising amount of things like this out there, fyi). Terrifying optical illusions are…
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The Long Haul #2: Brass Monkey
A year earlier, I’d celebrated my birthday with an all-night bash. The writing was going well, I went out dancing every night. Now I stared into snowy gloom and wondered what I’d been thinking.
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In Defense of Popular Fiction
“Contrary to what the critics tell us, popular fiction is not a swamp of barely literate escapism; popular fiction is composed of ancient myths newly reborn, telling and retelling a simple truth: ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Jack can…
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Portraits of Phone Sex Operators
“My first night was on a Saturday at midnight. It was a gentleman who I believe called himself Bob. He told me about his first experience with a glory hole. He explained that he had no one he felt comfortable…
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Aliens Have Souls
“He admits to being a science fiction fan, which got him into astronomy, and says he would be willing to baptise an alien, but “only if they asked.”” Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Pope’s astronomer, has officially announced that aliens, if…