American Apocalypse: The Wire and 2666
The name “Baltimore” can be traced to an Irish phrase meaning “Town of the Big House.” “Juárez,” when traced back to the Visigoths who overtook Spain in the 5th Century AD,…
Features & Reviews
9241 posts
The Last Book I Loved: Away
I fall in love with books all the time. I remember periods of my life this way – like “what’s-his-name left me when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway” or “I…
The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary
Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also…
Monica Shores: The Last Book I Loved, Madeleine is Sleeping
My assertion is that you will not have read a novel quite like Madeleine is Sleeping because I hadn’t, until I read it. A young girl jerks off the local…
Robert Mailer Anderson:The Last Book I Loved, 2666
The last book I loved was Roberto Bolano’s 2666. His powers as a narrator are staggering. His abilities to both deconstruct the novel, while also somehow meeting the brutality and…
Life in the Woods
Peter Rock’s darkly evocative fifth novel follows a father and daughter’s underground existence in a city park.
Jason Roberts: The Last Book I Loved, Soon I Will Be Invincible
I happen to agree that Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie) deserves its slot in the canon as one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. But…
Flannery on the Couch
In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
Cobblers and Coverless Books
Doing well: shoe repair shops and, according to the Telegraph of London, used bookstores:
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or…
The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later,…
The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it…