Best American Nonrequired Blog
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is compiled by a team of high school students who spend the year reading everything they can get their hands on.…
Features & Reviews
9295 posts
The Political is the Personal
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new memoir about life in the Socialist Workers Party shows the effects of political idealism on a child’s upbringing
The Last Book I Loved: Runaway
I came late to the Alice Munro party but now that I’m here I’m planted and staying. This book floored me—the first story, yes, good, interesting, intriguing, but it was…
Jeffrey Rotter and the Politics of Paranoia
Jeffrey Rotter’s debut novel The Unknown Knowns concerns a pasty comic book collector whose inability to distinguish between the real and the fantastic leads to terrible consequences.
Notes and Errata*: A Companion Guide to “The Unfinished”
*The Rumpus presents endnotes (and some additions and/or digressions) w/r/t “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max (The New Yorker, Mar. 9, 2009),
A Reading List as Suggested Posthumously by David Foster Wallace
Compiled from “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max.
A Jittery Spoonful of Surrealism
Monkeybicycle.net is the punchy literary magazine edited by Steven Seighman and Eric Spitznagel. The mag publishes writers like Tao Lin and Ryan Boudinot, and the piece on the site’s main…
Life’s Only as Bad as You Make It Out to Be
Chris Feliciano Arnold reviews Nami Mun’s debut novel, Miles from Nowhere.
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…
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…