Features & Reviews
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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 skewers the “How to Write a Book” industry, explaining why…
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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 out of the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks…
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Comics as Poetry
PORNOGRAPHIC BARN OWL creator Ian Huebert celebrates National Poetry Month Rumpus comics style: “Ordnung.”
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“There are many excellent stories that don’t interest me.”
“On Easter I signed up my first short story for the Paris Review. It’s by a young woman you’ve never heard of named April Ayers Lawson, and it’s an astonishment. All sex and brains and feeling. And it’s funny too.…
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The Absolute at Large
Three covers by Josef Čapek from the Japanese book Čapek’s Bookshelf, which collects 120 of his covers:
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THE JUMP OFF: The Sam Lipsyte Players
As part of our event, A Night Together, which was co-presented with Tin House and Flavorpill on April 6, we held a contest to give writers the chance to win an opportunity to read on stage with Sam Lipsyte. Entrants…
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The First Time Since 1981
“[Erika] Goldman is Editorial Director of Bellevue Literary Press, the tiny imprint behind Tinkers. To call it a surprise that Bellevue published a Pulitzer-winning novel — the first small press to do so since Louisiana State University Press published A…
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Cradle Song
Cradle Song is more than poetry. Stacey Lynn Brown has written a cultural history of the south, of its tenuous and tendentious relationships, of the complicated and often disturbing power struggles between women and men, black and white.
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Documenting Burroughs
“Each person can draw something completely different from him because he’s so multifaceted. I think it depends on the reader, but for me, I was first drawn to his awareness of control systems, the government, queer issues, drug control, and…
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“Under the Influence”
“Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) Hot tea and sherry “Raymond Chandler, The Blue Dahlia (1946) Gimlets and vitamin shots “Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (1829-1848) Coffee “Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries (1978) Heroin” Laphams Quearterly…
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Loud Libraries
Yesterday we mentioned that it’s National Library Week, a time to celebrate all things bibliotheca. But author Sung J. Woo is using the week in a more somber way, to mourn the loss of silence at local libraries. Woo states…
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The Journalist and the Autobiography
“Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the…