Features & Reviews
-
“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…
-
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, and The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Do you have a book…
-
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…
-
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 public from this spring….Many of the downmarket books known as…
-
“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 Publishing Hall of Fame.
-
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 porn to them. Monday 2/15: Misery loves company. Drag your…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Another Country
The beauty in Another Country is that it permits a reader to at once lament and celebrate the ways in which we use each other to further our own ideas of self.
-
Notable New York, This Week 2/15 – 2/21
This week in New York Howard Bloom interviewed by Richard Foreman, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik discuss mankind, John Cale reflects on music and art, Ed Park and Lynne Tillman read at Triple Canopy and Light Industry’s celebration of their…
-
Harold Evans on Journalism’s Roots
Famed British journalist and long-time editor of London’s Sunday Times, Harold Evans’ career of highlighting otherwise buried stories has been documented in his new book My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times. Evans spoke to NPR’s Morning Edition about…
-
Literary Fashionables: The Absurdist and the Word Portraitist
This week in New York, white tents are set up behind the New York Public Library in Bryant Park. It is called Fashion Week because it is a celebration of fashion of the sartorial kind. While that is happening in…