Dan Piepenbring
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More Flarf
In September, we mentioned Dan Piepenbring’s essay on the artfulness of the Paris Review’s junk mail. Head to 3:AM Magazine for some more randomly-generated poetry, Michael Naghten Shanks’s Selected Spam Haikus, like this one: pull wealth out of your deep brown beans when they invite…
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His Great Wide World
Ray Bradbury would’ve turned ninety-four this weekend. Dan Piepenbring commemorates his influence at The Paris Review: “Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can…
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Borges and Sartre at the Movies
Turns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well. Head over to the Paris…
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Happy Birthday, Mr. Maupassant
In celebration of Guy de Maupassant’s 164th birthday, Paris Review blogger Dan Piepenbring revisits his, ahem, seminal story, “Boule de Suif,” about a French prostitute who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to.” Read his coverage here, and the original…
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The Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge
The Baffler has a newly designed website, which includes all of its 25 issues, available for free. With so much talk about the New Yorker opening its digital gates this summer, let’s not forget “the Journal that Blunts the Cutting…
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The Poetry of Power Tools
Dan Piepenbring writes at the Paris Review about the universe inside industrial-supply catalogs, which offer a different kind of poetry to readers: And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a kind of materialist awe. It makes for a reading experience…
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Before QWERTY
Before life on the iPad keypad there was life on the QWERTY computer keypad, and before that, the architecture of the typewriter. Dan Piepenbring reports on the history of the typewriter which was, ah yes, “rife with collaboration, ingenuity, betrayal, setbacks, lucre,…
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A Great Escape
I came from, not a small town, but basically not a very interesting place…So it was very important for me not to rebel but simply to get away, to go away. Travel writing doesn’t have to be lackluster. It can…