Features & Reviews
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The Last Book I Loved: Honored Guest
One of my favorite books is the story-collection Honored Guest (2004) by Joy Williams.
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BEA Redux: Why the Show Must be Refashioned
With BookExpo America at a comfortable distance for reflection, it’s a good time to take a look at “Random BEA Thoughts,” Chad W. Post’s five-part essay on the need for reevaluating the book trade.
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AP to Distribute Nonprofit Journalism- Brief Rumpus Interviews with the Participants
Sy Hersh would be proud: the Associated Press announced last Saturday that it will distribute watchdog and investigative journalism from four leading nonprofit organizations to its 1,500 member newspapers. The deal will widen distribution of the groups’ work while addressing…
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Rebecca Steinitz: The Last Book I Loved, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
The last book I loved was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. I hadn’t loved a book in a while, but I thought I might love this one because it is a Persephone book, and I also quite…
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Beacon Press to Republish Out-of-print MLK Books
Beacon Press has come to an agreement with the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to republish four out-of-print books by the clergyman and civil rights leader, including “Strength to Love,” a collection of his most eloquent and inspiring…
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A Badass Biker Poet: Thom Gunn
Gunn’s work is imminently teachable in the form of Selected Poems, but it is derived from a world that now no longer exists: the Metaphysical poets drawn through the intermingling bodies of the Summer of Love: biker leather, drug haze,…
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Novelist disappears into illness, addiction
Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious”…
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The Window of Possessive Titles
One of the new window displays at Red Hill. My first contribution: the window of Possessive titles, a trend I can’t stop ranting about. Especially with novels. But still, an admirable array of authors employ this sure-fire titling method. I,…
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Typing Fast and Sitting Still
Blogging and stillness seem to be contradictory activities: I, along with many others, think of blogging as the relentless and hasty documentation of modern life on the go, news-in-brief for busybusy people. And yet what bloggers are often attempting is…
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Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff
A special comment by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes The Khomeinist regime in Iran is in terminal trouble; but that doesn’t mean Iran is about to repudiate Islam and become a…
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90 Miles from Home
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s stories about refugees from the Mariel Boatlift present the conflicts and loneliness of exile.
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Reading Lists on Serious Topics From the Back Pages of the Newspaper
Our view of the world is so often sculpted by front page and home page, so here is a look at some long-ongoing crises of self-determination that only occasionally surface in the news: First, Nigeria and Big Oil. I’m not…