Features & Reviews
-
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 to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.”
-
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.
-
Damion Searls: The Last Book I Loved, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories
I could never tell him apart from the other ones, Asch and Abramovitsh and Aleichem and the rest. And those titles like “Gimpel the Fool,” straight from the old country? Well Singer, and the translator of “Gimpel the Fool,” some…
-
Sean Kim: The Last Book I Loved, Last Evenings on Earth
It used to be that exile was unique to small, tight knit immigrant communities, but now I know it’s just a condition of living in the world. Roberto Bolano proves it. For him, exile is a life lived in existential…
-
Padma Viswanathan: The Last Book I Loved, Dancing With Cuba
The most recent book I have loved–a term I apply only to those few books that get a place in my personal canon–was Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba. Guillermoprieto’s books are great but few, so I saved this most recent…
-
They’re Called Cells for a Reason
A review of Micrographia People don’t read enough, and when they do, they don’t ask the questions of themselves that Micrographia demands.
-
The Last Book I Loved: The Fixer
A couple of years ago I went totally bananas over The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The story: Yakov, a Jewish man living in Russia in the early 1900s, is falsely accused of killing a Christian child. The book centers on…
-
The Last Book(s) I Loved: Juliet Linderman, Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia
It’s impossible to read George Saunders books slowly. This might be cheating because I’d read them before, although not in a few years, but a couple of weeks ago I picked up Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, Saunders’ two…
-
Alison Tyler: The Last Book I Loved, Born Standing Up
The album is from 1974, but we got our grubby little hands on a copy of a tape in the early 80s, which we played so often we had the words down pat in weeks. Would you believe we memorized…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Microcosms
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and Italy. Microcosms may not be as good as Danube, Magris’…
-
Why are we dead anyhow?
A brief look at James Purdy’s career. It is customary to speak of an artist having his fingers on the pulse of a nation’s culture. Purdy, on the contrary, repeatedly put his hands in the open wounds of American identity…
-
How Books Got Their Titles
A blog about how famous books got their titles, peppered with amusing and surprisingly sexual anecdotes. John Cleland’s title Fanny Hill is dirty, but not for the reasons you might think. Marie Stopes’ 1918 Married Love might be the most…