Melanie Rae Thon Award Reading
The annual Gina Berriault Award “honors a fiction writer whose work exemplifies the qualities that distinguish the novels and short stories of the late beloved teacher and writer, Gina Berriault.”…
Features & Reviews
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Any Day Now, by Terry Bisson
“In this universe the night was falling…” So muses Clayton Bewley, the uprooted Kentuckian at the center of Terry Bisson’s latest novel Any Day Now. It’s a line Clay plucks…
From Weed to Worm
Letters of Note shares four letters from Woody Allen that appear in Diane Keaton’s recent memoir, Then Again. “Don’t be fooled by THE ARTS! They’re no big deal; certainly no…
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
“Nothing Elizabeth Ellen has ever written has ever been political, ever.” At least according to the four teenage girls in this vimeo book trailer called “A Brief Bio by Elizabeth…
A Brilliant Button Without Any Cloth
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
THE WEEK IN GREED #5: The Willy Loman Vote
A few weeks ago I was in an airport and I did that dumb thing I so often do in airports, which is to retrieve a stray section of USA…
The Last Book I Loved: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie:
I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different…
The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
“Domina, Doreen, Dorma,” published in Everyday Genius, was the first of the stories which make up Cataclysm Baby to surface. Since then, what eventually became a novella puzzled itself out…
Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
Truman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as…
The Greatest Show
In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of…
A Literary Sunday in LA
Just one week after the LA Times Festival of Books, the LA literary scene is showing no sign of letting up. On Sunday night, April 29th at 7pm, the Rhapsodomancy…