Columns
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #4: Keep the Change
This week, your Storming Bohemian has moved to a new house. Again. And so some reflections: There is much to be said for stability, I know. The steady quiet observation of the likes of Annie Dillard or Henry Thoreau evokes…
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The Palm Tree Falls into the Sea
We regularly turn to Aquarium Drunkard for its mixtapes, and this week the site has released another perfect moodscape for the season. The Palm Tree Falls into the Sea: An August Mixtape is the end-of-summer jammer you’re searching for, with songs from…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Granta’s summer issue is themed “The Legacies of Love,” and in a new story from the online issue, Glasgow-based writer Sophie Mackintosh strips love back to its animal bones in a story that is less rom-com and more Hunger Games,…
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“Specialists in All Styles”
In an interview with Tobias Carroll for Men’s Journal, Teju Cole discusses his affinity for the work of writer and critic John Berger, and how that relationship has informed his own writing: I think what we get from the artists,…
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The Mortgage Arrangement
It’s true that real estate can’t save a marriage. But it might be equally true that it can save a relationship.
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Cook the Books
Cook’s portraits are usually accompanied by texts distilled from interviews she conducts with her subjects (afterward, she says, because she prefers the shoot itself to remain as meditative as possible). This provides her, and her audience, with a verbal layer…
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Notable Chicago: 8/26–9/1
Friday 8/26: 57th Street Books hosts a Showcase of Queer Chicago Poets with Jay Besemer, H. Melt, and Evan Kleekamp. 6 p.m, free. Join the Bitter Women Book Club at City Lit Books to discuss After Claude by Iris Owens.…
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Barbizon Revisited
For Lit Hub, Nathan Hill takes us through the history of the Barbizon Hotel, recounting its role as an incubator for young women writers of the mid-20th century and as a landmark for those same writers to touch upon and…
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What’s in a Name?
The power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our identities. At The Establishment, Jené Gutierrez recounts an argument with her editors over using the correct rendering of bell hooks’s name, and how language has historically functioned as…
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All That We Could Do with This Emotion
Writing for the Guardian, novelist Val McDermid disputes the recent study which suggests that “literary” fiction readers are more empathetic than “genre” readers: There is no doubt that, historically, there was a valid distinction. Nobody would attempt to suggest that there is an…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
I guess we have to discuss the popularity (among angry white men) of the world “cuck” now. What a fun year. Fish sticks: food of the future! Solar-powered desalinating ring gardens will save us all. Failed Architecture photographs the awful…
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The Rumpus Interview with Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, discusses oppression, objectivity in journalism, and millennial politics.