Features & Reviews
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The Rising of the Ashes
What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.
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Poet Loses Favorite Cafe Table
“‘I wrote three books sitting at the table,’ he said.” Poet Rodrigo Toscano laments the closing of the Greenpoint Coffeehouse in Brooklyn, where he wrote for seven years.
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Why Read Nonfiction?
Over at The Utne Reader, Keith Goetzman asks a question originally posed by John D’Agata, “Do we read (nonfiction) to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”
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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 life of the mind. The Carne family are arty and…
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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 deliberate, and when he came out of it, he’d come…
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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 and wrote experimental fiction. The other moved to Vogue out…
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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
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“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.” Rumpus contributor Eric Puchner, author of today’s essay about titling…
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Vanity Fair
The essays in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs explore the many successes and admirable qualities of their author.
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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, and The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Do you have a book…
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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 seemingly opposing aesthetics, both Sontag and Plimpton promulgated revolutionary ideas…
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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.