Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!Everyday life is surprisingly full of hair-raising adventures. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’re in the thick of it. Waiting for the grocery store manager to confirm that you are not in fact the same guy who stole the roast chicken three days prior. Finding yourself in your boss’s office, waiting for him to […]
...more“The great thing about freelance, of course, is the numerous freedoms it embraces, chief among them being the freedom to work in your underwear. This seems to be the one that everyone knows. I was talking on the phone to an uncle of mine who’s in a nursing home, and when I told him I […]
...moreJust like last week, Belgium, for reasons obtuse and inexplicable is on my mind. I discovered at 50 Watts a guest post by Edward Gauvin about a Belgian writer named Thomas Owen that English-only readers are not going to encounter anytime soon. As a fan of pseudonyms, alter-egos and Pessoa’s heteronyms, I loved this autobiographical […]
...moreThere’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied. And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan.
...moreRemainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver. But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard.
...moreIn school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering meaning in the ruins of war. One of the founding Imagists, H.D. was Ezra Pound’s muse, D.H. Lawrence’s “platonic lover” and friend and one-time patient […]
...moreLong before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from his grizzled lips and a swaggering nonchalance befitting only a soldier and a drifter, penned […]
...moreIn Santa Cruz, I had occasion to meet some hobos. Real or fake hobos: it was hard to make the distinction in a town so enshrined to the misfit ideal. There was a train bridge near the roller-coaster that you could walk across if you were brave enough. (Yeah, it was the same train bridge […]
...moreI just found out that James Franco is set to direct the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is the most violent novel I’ve ever read. So I pose the obvious questions: how will he pull it off? Who will play The Judge? What will the rating boards think? Just how many scalpings […]
...moreAs The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones that keep piling up on my desk, on my floor, in my bed with the […]
...moreFor me, having been inculcated with pictures of a bloody, naked man nailed to a tree since I was five, any discussion of obscenity, homo-eroticism or sexual violence begins with Jesus, or at least the Jesus that hangs in churches, around necks and is furiously waved in the faces of “sodomites.”
...moreJust to let all discriminating book-buyers know: Rebecca Solnit’s new gorgeously-illustrated and highly-collaborative book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas is out now at all independent bookstores.
...moreI’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue between the two books can be quite illuminating. How one chooses which books to pair […]
...moreDavid Talbot, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, came into Red Hill Books recently to drop off his latest creation, Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story Of The Man Who Saved America, one of the first installments in the Pulp History series — a series that will blow minds left and right now and in the coming […]
...moreHere’s something I missed from earlier this month: Margaret Atwood took her recent dystopian novel, The Year Of The Flood on the road with thespians, activists and a documentary film team! Personally, I think book tours should integrate as many non-book-related elements as possible. Shake things up a bit. Take the book out of its […]
...moreI grew up collecting baseball cards. They were my first passion. It was an exciting hobby because every pack initiated a quest. It wasn’t that I cared much for the game but I was just an inveterate collector, especially of the rarer cards. My Dad would take a much-needed day off work and take me […]
...moreI wasn’t a bad kid growing up, I just liked to steal things — vodka, cigars, communion wine — and set things on fire. Once or twice I used profanity in the presence of a nun. But I only had my rights read to me once and even then the cop looked pretty bored about […]
...more(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, […]
...moreIn his late thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a series of emotional and mental breakdowns, many of which he wrote about in a series of random essays and observations collected under the title, The Crack-Up. At the beginning of the self-titled essay, he writes: “Of course, all of life is a process of breaking down, […]
...more“At a luncheon earlier in the day with Hitchens and Berlinski, Taunton asked Hitchens about his health problems. ‘Well, I’m dying, since you asked,’ Hitchens replied. ‘So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail.’” Despite recently undergoing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, Hitchens still shows up to debate a […]
...moreAfter negotiating a last minute address change, among other last minute changes, I finally received my much-anticipated copy of The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. I haven’t had much time with it yet but, after the first twenty pages, I can safely say it is a pretty incredible read. If the mishaps of Slutty […]
...more“Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.” At Bookslut, a detailed discussion of the points made in the […]
...moreTony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series of personal essays he wrote for the New York Review Of Books this year.
...moreI’m a sucker for blurbs, I have to admit. But then writers blurb their friends, right? It’s just the right thing to do, so maybe it doesn’t say that much about the book. Yet I’m always looking to see what writers have praised what books and why. It’s borderline compulsive. (Jonathan Lethem, I’ve decided, has […]
...moreIf you’re like me, Middlesex blew your mind. Here was a book chock-full of wildly different themes, all of them improbably interconnected: incest, genocide, Detroit, the Nation of Islam and hermaphrodites, to name but a few. It was a novel that did a lot, almost too much and which took its author, Jeffrey Eugenidies ten […]
...moreI harp endlessly about my favorite things, one of which is Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, which I harped about before on the Rumpus. And now The Millions has joined the chorus, as Garth Hallberg ponders the ambiguities and joys of Dhalgren, in the most recent installment of Difficult Books.
...moreNow that it’s summertime, one in three people who shop at my bookstore are looking for travel guides, phrase books, travelogues or history books about some enticing destination. Yesterday a woman bought a Russian phrase book. I told her that I heard a Starbucks cappuccino costs fifteen U.S. dollars if you buy it in Red […]
...moreFirst it was Infinite Jest and now readers will be tackling the world’s oldest novel this summer, Tale Of Genji. I want someone to have a summer of The Recognitions next. Or Don Quixote or Crime And Punishment. Or maybe a reading group can convince me to keep reading Women And Men by Joseph McElroy. […]
...more“‘No two persons ever read the same book,’ the writer and critic Edmund Wilson said. Let me expand that sentiment outward into the geography of experience: it seems increasingly clear to me that no two persons live in the same city.” At The Millions, an insightful commentary on China Mieville’s The City And The City. […]
...more“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other from the tree of time. “Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game I lit it and walked along the corridor with it. The breeze stirred up by […]
...more