A Childish Fantasy
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong…
Features & Reviews
9262 posts
The Last Book I Loved: Alina Simone, Unlovable
Unlovable (Fantagraphics Books) is a graphic novel by Esther Pearl Watson that is based on a diary the author found in a gas station bathroom in the 1980’s belonging to…
Kerouac’s lost French works
The Words without Borders blog has a fascinating post on two novellas by Jack Kerouac in his native French, works that were written in the early 1950s and which reflect…
The Secret History
J. Robert Lennon’s latest novel explores the darkness of the land and the soul.
The Last Book I Loved: The Braindead Megaphone
I think I would maybe like to be George Saunders.
“Stripping is as much a part of who I am as my Ph.D.”
$pread‘s Will Rockwell takes a stroll with Craig Seymour in New York’s Lower East Side to get the dish on the debut of Seymour’s recently released memoir, All I Could…
The Poetry of Plunder: Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower’s first collection of short stories meditates on danger and beauty—and it’s funny as hell.
Scott Hutchins: The Last Book I Loved, The Easter Parade
It seems that every once in a while living writers pick a dead writer to gather around and champion, and this was definitely the case with Richard Yates around the…
Secondhand Bookiestore
A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes…
The Last Book I Loved: The Road
This semester, I decided to teach The Road by Cormac McCarthy. After I got my desk copy, I was sitting on BART, on my way home, and I started rereading…
The Rumpus Original Combo: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want…
Chandler’s Reverse Romances
March 26, 2009 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Raymond Chandler, the most important American detective fiction writer of the twentieth century.