Other Lubrication: The Rumpus Interview with Kevin Keck
Kevin Keck is the author of the contagious, THC-laden memoirs Oedipus Wrecked, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Kevin. Inside my copy of his collected poems titled My Summer…
Features & Reviews
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Book Version Bonanza
Over the decades, the world has upgraded from iron cast printing press to ink jet printers, and yet the complexities of publishing have recently shifted from the how to the…
More Disch
“Disch’s take is that by living out the misery of our predecessors virtually, we can gain a bit more insight and compassion with regard to our misery and that of…
“A History of the Timeline”
“Cartographies of Time, published recently by Princeton Architectural Press, is an eye-popping record of the ways that mapmakers, chronologists, artists and others have tried to convey the passage of time…
Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life #1
“Chuck Prophet Writes the Songs That Make, Well, Not the Whole World, But a Small, Statistically Insignificant Portion of it Sing”
The Unsettling Visions Of Thomas Disch
“Fantasy is not avoidable. The very act of writing fiction is a sin, a lie. One of Disch’s most haunting stories, ‘Getting Into Death,’ is about a writer (one who…
Misadventure
Millard Kaufman’s posthumously published novel evokes noir films of the past in the contemporary labyrinth of Los Angeles.
Phoenix Books In San Francisco Turns 25
It’s something of a major milestone to keep an independent, used bookstore running for twenty-five years. And that’s exactly what Phoenix Books in San Francisco is celebrating this month. So…
The Hurdles Of Rejection
“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often…
“I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish’’’
“For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, Tinkers, sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody…
Forget “How-To” and Do
“My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write.” Richard Bausch…
The Last Book I Loved: Just Kids
I finished reading Just Kids by Patti Smith at Four Barrel on Valencia Street in San Francisco and although I tried my hardest to blink them back, tears kept falling…