NancyKay Shapiro: The Last Book I Loved, The Brontës Went to Woolworths
There is nothing else quite lik Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went to Woolworths, in which a family of sisters and their widowed mother in 1920s London live a most unusual…
Features & Reviews
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“There is no such thing as bad whiskey…”
“‘The maddening thing about Bill Faulkner,’ recalled Random House founder Bennett Cerf in his memoir At Random, ‘was that he’d go off on one of those benders, which were sometimes…
Literary Fashionables: The Junky and The New Journalist
Today’s two Literary Fashionables traveled in distinct social settings at the time of their rise to literary fame. One moved with exiles, hustlers and runaways in Paris, Mexico and Tangier…
Punk Rock Literati: Wells Tower and Hellbender
In June 1964 Hunter S. Thompson wrote a, for lack of a better word, gonzo letter to President Lyndon Johnson from the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota
“Age 21: Small Fires”
“I write a creative senior thesis, five short stories. I name it Small Fires. There’s a collection of poetry by Raymond Carver called Fires. These are smaller ones, I guess.”…
Vanity Fair
The essays in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs explore the many successes and admirable qualities of their author.
What Tao Is Reading
Tao Lin hast posted his reading diary, including only books he has “finished or anticipate[s] finishing.” The list includes Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dog,…
Literary Fashionables: The Cultural Theorist and The Sportsman
Two hallowed New York intellectuals are The Rumpus’s next set of Literary Fashionables. Susan Sontag and George Plimpton both circled the upper tiers of Manhattan’s literary society. And while exhibiting…
The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds
What makes a good title? The Great Gatsby is one for the ages—but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call his novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss dreamed up for The Playboy Channel.
Free Dreadfuls
Terrific news in last Sunday’s Times of London: “MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the…
“The thumbtown toad laughed so hard that she burst into fire.”
George Mendoza and Monika Beisner’s Thumbtown Toad belongs on your bookshelf next to Struwwelpeter, and the brave, childless team at Prentice Hall which published it in 1971 belongs in the…
Notable San Francisco, This Week: 2/15-2/21
This week: Recover from Sunday at A Valentine’s Day Post Mortem, John D’Agata reads at USF, Noise Pop invades Nightlife, and the Mission loves bikes so much it finally dedicates…