In the Saturday Essay, Lisa Borders describes moving to a small community in southern New Jersey at thirteen. It’s the sort of place where everyone knows the difference between “good” and…
First, Brandon Hicks brings us an illustrated retrospective of the works of Franklin “Boobs & Butt” Barber. Then, in the Saturday Rumpus Review of Todd Haynes’s movie Carol, Sean Donovan considers how…
First, in the Saturday Essay, Alana Hauser remembers the evil spirit from David Lynch’s eerie TV drama, Twin Peaks. The “parasitic” spirit, named Bob, is “a frightening reflection on the pervasive reality…
Many authors’ stories blend together across a collection; they struggle to convey a unique voice in each piece. Not so with Jen Michalski’s From Here. Though her characters share common…
Fridays at Enrico’s (Counterpoint) Don’t write about writing. That gets said a lot. But like any absolute about what not to do, it’s only true until someone does it well.…
There are many reasons that an author would want to put a book–an actual physical object–into a reader’s hands, rather than just communicating data. Some books rebuff the notion that…
What sends us to our beds? Desire, sure. Sex. But also sickness. Sleep. Loneliness and healing. Jessica Keener’s Women in Bed is a collection of nine stories about women at…
What we do to each other in moments breeds a kind of emotional genealogy that can’t be undone. The characters in Kate Milliken’s debut collection, If I’d Known You Were…