Lit-Link Round-up
This week concluded the excellent Story Week Festival, held by Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing Department, where I’ve taught for something like 13 years. If you ever come to Chicago at…
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Everything that can’t be categorized but is still wonderful!
Reading Where You Do Not Belong
Somehow I’d never heard of Sylvia Townsend Warner until the New Yorker posted its fiction podcast this week, which is Colm Toìbìn reading one of Warner’s stories. In my life,…
Saturday History Lessons: That Time Wallace Stevens Punched Hemingway
Truth be told I don’t like macho posturing in literary feuds — or rather, the only thing I like about it is the opportunity it provides me to practice the…
On Ann Patchett on the Sexual Revolution
So look, Ann Patchett’s writing is great and the Sexual Revolution is great and I think everyone should be in favour of birth control because really, why not? But I’m…
I Hereby Volunteer To Write Ryan Gosling’s First Novel
I’m going to break the Rumpus rule against pop culture here for a minute. (Hell, it’s Saturday.) It’s only to note Gwyneth Paltrow’s complaint, this week, that the New York…
Trayvon Martin
President Obama made a statement this morning. Updates from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was on PBS Newshour last night. “Anyone who’s outside of straight white maleness, you have to deal with…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Let us consider small moments of comfort as one prepares to freeze to death. Here’s some 1960s mod bubblegum stickers for you. In a similar vein: super cheerful early 20th…
Alice Walker Interview
The Atlantic converses with Alice Walker. The Pulitzer-prize winning author reflects on America as a “people in the making,” the importance of poetry, standing up for women, and aging. “…There’s…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
So, uh, here are a bunch of pictures from a Chinese gangster’s stolen cellphone. On the musical preferences of animals (not you). Vintage European circus posters are pretty great. “40,000…
Trayvon Martin
A Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin is taking place in NYC right now. Live streaming video here. There’s a Bay Area Million Hoodies March that begins at the Bradley…
Mass Unfriending
“The idea of ‘cleaning out’ Facebook friends is getting more popular: The percentage of people unfriending other Facebook members rose from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011.…
“Diva Boy”
At The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn writes about her relationship with her older brother. “By then Ken’s life was no secret. He’d already fought all his battles. His…