Finding Meaning in Where the Why Leads: Talking with Kyle Beachy
Kyle Beachy discusses his new memoir, THE MOST FUN THING.
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Posts Tagged: Don DeLillo
The Light Endures: 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
Grief begs to be analogized, not to be tamed exactly, but somehow made approachable.
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A Literary Tasting Menu: My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee
Simply put, the novel’s heart is not political but sensual.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Tracy O’Neill
Tracy O’Neill discusses her new novel QUOTIENTS.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #199: Stuart M. Ross
“Ty is, you know, tied in a knot. On a very old shoe.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #154: Jaclyn Gilbert
“We have to create spaces for all voices to be heard in us.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #148: Daniel Torday
“I also wanted this to be a deeply overtly American book.”
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What’s Between the Covers: A Conversation with Naben Ruthnum
Naben Ruthnum discusses CURRY: EATING, READING, AND RACE and FIND YOU IN THE DARK.
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The Human Cost: Discussing Political Storytelling with Olivia Kate Cerrone
Olivia Kate Cerrone discusses her novella The Hunger Saint and the significance of historical fiction.
...moreDread and Magic
Isn’t the crowd itself a kind of anti-literature, an intensely physical impediment to the inwardness required of poetry and prose? At Lit Hub, Dustin Illingworth writes about literature that theorizes “the crowd,” from Don DeLillo to Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, with horror and fascination.
...moreEngdahl’s Game
Another year, another Nobel Prize in Literature not given to Don DeLillo. At The New Republic, Alex Shephard argues that DeLillo should have been a contender: …of all the leading American Nobel candidates, DeLillo is a writer of the moment. In an essay published three months after the September 11 attacks, Don DeLillo wrote that the problem […]
...moreSome Kind of Deft Acceleration
Over at the New Yorker, Thomas Beller writes about reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, with its opening move-in day scene on repeat, and the ways stories change when read again and again—even and especially presidential races and speeches, as with Bill Clinton’s speech at this past DNC.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs
Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now.
...moreWhere Books Meet Their Ends
For the Guardian, Sam Jordison draws parallels between Don DeLillo’s previous novels (White Noise and Omega) and his most recent novel, Zero K: In Point Omega, we’re told: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” In White Noise, meanwhile, Jack Gladney already feels like he is the false character following his name […]
...moreThe Cool Future
“All plots tend to move deathward,” the narrator of “White Noise” says. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as […]
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Total Noise and Complete Saturation
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested, in a clinical way, in silence.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Shields and Caleb Powell
Writers David Shields and Caleb Powell can’t stop fighting, even about their new book-length argument and forthcoming film, I Think You’re Totally Wrong.
...moreFor Gentlemen Only
The lack of literary interest in the game is surprising, since it serves as the perfect lens through which to examine our fractured state: its ingrained prejudices, gender distortions, money lust, and, above all, the culture of brute violence that has come under increased scrutiny of late. For Electric Literature, Ravi Mangla reflects on Don […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #60: On Mentorship
In an empirically-preoccupied world, mentorship appears to be unscientific, impossible to quantify, and perhaps even sentimental.
...moreDeep in Don DeLillo’s Underworld
I have fairly clear recollections of writing the book—the room, the desk, the painting on the wall, the feeling that after two years of work (of an eventual four years) I now considered myself a novelist[.] Stephanie Lacava had a fax exchange with Don DeLillo prior to the auctioning of an author-annotated copy of Underworld. Head over […]
...moreTaylor Swift’s White Noise
Nothing much more needs to be said: At the Atlantic, “the author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise.”
...moreSeriously Serious
Over at the Paris Review, Jason Novak has taken up the pen again; this time, he’s turned to authors and their eccentricities. Among his observations: “Somewhere Hemingway is sitting quietly at his desk. Pouring another bull. And fighting another drink.” Other targets include Don DeLillo, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nabokov, Heidegger, and the state of Publishing […]
...moreExamining the Ordinary
Stephan Eirik Clark, author of a new novel about artificial sweeteners, Sweetness #9, discusses his fascination with Don DeLillo’s White Noise over at The Atlantic: White Noise, though—it was something more. It was getting at what I’d always wanted to get. It was full of American yearning, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for the 20th […]
...moreFourth Down and Longing
A memoir of life as a disappointed fan becomes a meditation on “isolation and the things we do to overcome our loneliness… emptiness, and not knowing how to fill it.”
...moreBright Lights, Big City and “The Shattering of the Self”
“…Jay McInerney’s 1984 publication of Bright Lights allows us excavation to an even earlier level of American self-confusion. The novel’s second-person narrative, which people found so powerfully affecting, cannot be dismissed as but a clever trick when seen in a broader context—as a visceral reaction to the early stage of a society where Don DeLillo’s […]
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