Tom Treanor: The Last Book I Loved, Music for Torching
A. M. Homes’ Music for Torching is a hard sell: A suburban couple in spitting distance of forty find themselves each in the middle of a midlife crisis. What can…
Features & Reviews
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Don’t Be a Coward: The Rumpus Interview with Philipp Meyer
“All of us, all the time, are searching for some order in the world/universe/our lives. We’re searching for guiding principles and explanations. Especially in times of stress, we tend to…
The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: The Rumpus Interview with Julian Rubinstein
Ten years ago today, Attila Ambrus (a.k.a. the “Whiskey Robber”), arguably the worst pro-hockey goalie in history, hastily twisted together a makeshift rope out of computer cables and bedsheets and…
The Thing Around Your Neck
In her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moves back and forth between two continents the way she has in real life.…
Childhood as a Branch of Cartography
“We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and…
Who Needs Philosophy?
Back when I was a little boy, living in a yellow stucco house in San Diego, I would sit in the hot tub at night, under desert-clear stars, listen to…
A Little Bit About AK Press
For the past couple years I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Oakland-based AK Press, a small, “anarchist collective” press that publishes about twenty to thirty books a year,…
Through a Glass Darkly
“I don’t know where we got the idea that helping sick people means keeping them away from the jaws of death at all costs…”
Why Do Scandinavians Seek The Darkness?
One of the biggest selling, most highly-praised novels at my bookstore right now is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Since it just came out in paperback,…
Billy Twitters and His Big Blue Whale Problem
Mac Barnett, former director of 826LA, has released a children’s book: Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem. JR at Three Guys One Book has this to say:
Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick
I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist. I remember feeling this during a month…
Robot Horses Waging War on Angels: A Profile of Chris Eaton
There are bodies, and there are words. The bodies shift sides and see their components replaced; they look in mirrors and see themselves made horrific, the mechanical overtaking the organic,…