Colum McCann
“Every novel is a failure. You can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. That thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you…
Features & Reviews
9213 posts
The February House: Something To Aspire To
I’ve recently been in awe of the short stories of Paul Bowles, the American ex-pat novelist, composer, and translator who lived in Morocco and wrote The Sheltering Sky and who…
Studs Terkel And The FBI
“In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy — maybe if he’d gotten the job, we would have had “CSI: Studs Terkel.” But the…
Chomsky At Guernica
“The people we call intellectuals aren’t necessarily smarter or more knowledgeable than anyone else. But they happen to have a lot of privilege, and privilege confers responsibility. And so they…
A Future Always Pure and Perfect and Remote
Jon Stephen Fink’s novel A Storm in the Blood imagines the lives of Jews, anti-Tsarists, and revolutionaries in London’s East End.
The Revolutionary Of Everyday Life
“We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been…
Dood in Ecstasy – Dutch Mystery Covers
Hermann Hilgendorff, Het duel der maskers, 1930s Cover by Jac. da Costa from the collection of twincovercollector I discovered Uilke Komrij’s flickr page (uk vintage) through Drawn’s post about his…
Monster Girl: The Rumpus Interview with Chelsea Martin
“The second and fourth parts of that sentence came directly from life, but the first and third parts came from some thoughts I had while watching a movie, and the…
Doctors Who Write
“Patients bring us stories,” Terrence Holt explains. “We drop into the middle of patients’ stories and try to change the plot for the better. First we have to understand it, however.…
Drew Johnson: The Last Book I Loved, The House of Hunger
‘A writer drew a circle in the sand and stepping into it said “This is my novel,” but the circle, leaping, cut him clean through….’ —from The House of Hunger…
Salvage Artist: The Rumpus Original Combo with Bonnie Jo Campbell
“I like to go where the life is. I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death. I’m of the people in…
An Extra March to Fetch the Year Around
Thoreau’s Journal is forthcoming in a new edition from NYRB Classics, abridged by Damion Searls; the Quarterly Conversation’s Geoff Wisner has given a favorable and interesting review of the book: