Features & Reviews
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Jim Shepard on Writing Fiction That’s Got Some Truth to It
“The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: …
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The Organization of Pain and Joy
Tom Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, is fashioned entirely of artful silence and alluring reticence.
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Blog Blurbs on Books?
On the cover of Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, a blurb from Mark Sarvos of the blog The Elegant Variation graces its bottom left corner. On his website, Brian Sholis (writer and former editor of Artforum) asks…
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Illustrated Interview
Artist Isaac Littlejohn Eddy recently interviewed Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, for The Sun & Anchor. Aside from being an interesting discussion about Iran, writing, belonging to two worlds, and Islam,…
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Fables of the Reconstruction
With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Cornelia Nixon weaves a tapestry of events to explain how an ordinary girl in post-Civil War Maryland kills her lover and gets away with it.
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Reviews
“Just how many bonghits did Wong do before he sat down to write this thing? How old is the author?” -Kenny Squires tackles David Wong’s John Dies at the End. “Let’s face it: Even when you’re breaking up with a…
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Kati Standefer: The Last Book I Loved, The Lake
The first time I read The Lake by Daniel Villasenor I was fifteen, crunched into the backseat of our tiny family Chrysler and on my way to Georgia. I’d plucked the book off a library shelf because it had the…
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From the Department of Possibly Lost But Nevertheless Immensely Worthwhile Causes
In all the understandable uproar about the impending disembowelment of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, I haven’t yet seen a suggestion that readers and writers try to do something about the situation. And so, after a minute of crack sleuthing, I’ve…
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Banned Books Week
According to the American Library Association there were “at least 513 actual and attempted book bannings in the US in 2008.” At the top of the list? And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. That’s right. A…
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Mash-Up Money
Seth Grahame-Smith is best known for his mash-up novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and its follow up Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters. Well Lincoln Michel wants the world to know that he too will gladly “add monsters to any…
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Hans Kulla-Mader: The Last Book I Loved, The Magicians
I love magic. Be it imagining myself wandering the hills of Narnia or riding a rickety boat on Earthsea’s fog ridden waters—I just want it so bad. I want to be in the club, know the secret, feel sorry for…
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The Surface of Things: The Rumpus Long Interview with Tao Lin
The characters in Tao Lin’s work drink smoothies, use g-chat and steal, all with equal gravity, or lack thereof.