A FAN’S NOTES: Beautiful Losers
My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick…
Blogs
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An Emergency Broadcast from Sugar: An Abortion Near Sarah Palin’s Front Lawn
Do what you can, forgive yourself the rest.
The Last Book I Loved: Microcosms
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and…
FUNNY AMERICA: The Baby Steps Blues
Excuse me, but I got a couple of questions. What’s the damn deal? The hell happened? Am I missing something? I mean, come on, Barack Obama assumed office almost two…
Welcome to Rumpus Books
At The Rumpus, we believe that a healthy literary culture is one which embraces writing of all kinds, by authors of all stripes – young and old, established and emerging, traditional and experimental, writing from the margins or from (or about) the heart of mainstream culture, published by “major” houses or by smaller presses.
The Last Book I Loved: In A Lonely Place
The book I am reading and loving right now is In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. I have known and loved the Humphrey Bogart movie based on the…
FADE TO ORANGE: The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face
Call it the Theory of Receptivity. It’s the idea, often stated by young people and applied as a dismissive accusation to even marginally older people, that one’s taste in music,…
The Last Book I Loved: Away
I fall in love with books all the time. I remember periods of my life this way – like “what’s-his-name left me when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway” or “I…
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or…
The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later,…