john steinbeck
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We Are More: Shattering the Ethnic Monolith Myth in The Gimmicks
To say the past is in the past ignores the abundant ways it controls their lived experience.
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The Mystery Tugs: Talking with Joel Mowdy
Joel Mowdy discusses his debut story collection, FLOYD HARBOR.
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Messy and Complicated and Real: Talking with Laura Pritchett
Author Laura Pritchett discusses her two most recent books, death, sex, and being rural in modern America.
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So Woke, Steinbae
At Timeline, Matt Reimann finds a predecessor to the modern “woke apology” in John Steinbeck’s remarks on his novel Tortilla Flat: Steinbeck’s plea here so closely mirrors the structure of the modern political correctness apology, he may well have invented…
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The Popular Vote
The Library of Congress recently polled American citizens to find out what books had the most profound effect on them. Among the 17,000-plus survey respondents, popular answers were books like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s The Stand, and The Cat in…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat
It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.
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The Rumpus Review of The Big Short
My reading of the audience’s reaction to the bombast of The Big Short is not that people genuinely find the story amusing, but rather, that we are experiencing discomfort while simultaneously expecting to be entertained.
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Mapping Literary Road Trips
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books featured include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey discusses his latest book of essays, More Curious, being David Foster Wallace’s neighbor, the healing power of the American road trip, and the difference between writing fiction and memoir.
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Would You Rather Babysit Cathy Ames or Christine Hargensen?
What do Yukio Mishima, Tana French, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck have in common? They’re the masterminds behind a couple of the most evil fictional youngsters of all time, according to a list compiled by British bookstore Abebooks. The list…
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War Narratives #1: Truth and Fiction
The notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
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Of Mice and Machines
Ever wonder what John Steinbeck would make of angel investors and Google? McSweeney’s contributor Thomas Scott has reimagined Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men, taking George and Lennie from the fields of Great Depression-era California to modern-day Silicon Valley.