Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!Monday 6/26: Mel Goodman discusses and signs Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence. 7 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore. ALOUD presents An Evening with Roxane Gay. She will be discussing her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, in conversation with journalist Ann Friedman. 7:30 p.m. at the Aratani Theatre. […]
...moreClay Byars—author of Will & I, his recently released memoir about being an identical twin—tackles big life questions and the writing process with Drew Broussard for FSG Originals. Edited by Byars’s friend John Jeremiah Sullivan, Will & I explores “the sense that I was more than myself,” as a twin, as Byars puts it, and the meta-conscious act […]
...moreThe writer, existing only in reflection, is of all beings most excluded from the highest realms. Over at the New Yorker, John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about the prominence of tennis in the works of David Foster Wallace—in both Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction, tennis is the writer’s most apparently revisited subject, and for good reason, as […]
...moreJohn Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel chronicle the rise, fall, and in-between wanderings of Houstonian booksellers, civil rights activists, reporters, and musicians—in oversized, Texan fashion. Most people have heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, canonical English poet and laudanum addict. Far fewer know the life and work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Coleridge-Taylor was a black composer, London-born, his […]
...more(n.) commonly, a little grebe or dabchick, a small water bird that dives underwater; also, a name for someone who disappears for a time before bobbing up again His papers looked organized, from the outside, they weren’t messy, but there were tens of thousands of pages. And photographs? Thousands of them, scattered through which are […]
...moreI am trying to charm the reader because I want him and her to come with me deeper into the piece. If you can bring them with you there, things get more interesting.
...moreIt is mildly surprising that the New York Times didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “My Debt to Ireland” as fit to print in its Sunday magazine on a date closer to March 17, and, actually, it’s sort of a shame, because Sullivan’s piece undercuts a certain mythology many Irish-Americans keep about Ireland the country […]
...moreJohn Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead should be hailed not simply as a fabulous piece of writing but as a landmark debut of a new genre, invented by others but perfected here.
...moreWith healthy doses of Axl Rose and methamphetamines, two new collections, from journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan and crime fiction writer Frank Bill, call forth the power of place and personal history in the Shallow South.
...more