What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?
...more
Julian K. Jarboe discusses EVERYONE ON THE MOON IS ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL.
...more
Clare Beams discusses her debut novel, THE ILLNESS LESSON.
...more
Garrard Conley and Taylor Larsen discuss their recent work.
...more
“I was moved to write the unspeakable and unsayable.”
...more
Elizabeth McCracken discusses her new novel, BOWLAWAY.
...more
[W]hat do you do when you meet the Buddha on the road?
...more
America: land where anything can and does happen. Doors blow open by magic when you step on a rubber mat.
...more
David Biespiel discusses his new book, The Education of a Young Poet, being comfortable in uncertainty, and extending moments in writing.
...more
Taylor Larsen discusses her debut novel, Stranger, Father, Beloved, writing about New England, falling in love with her characters, and the surprises of debut authorship.
...more
Samantha Hunt discusses her new collection, The Dark Dark, why she became a writer, and the freeing quiet of darkness.
...more
I am meditating. In a room in Rodeo, at the rickety old secretary/dresser I use as a desk. It is by a window. I look out at the roadway, and think I am glad to live at a crossroad. The house across the street is silver grey. By its front stoop is a tree all […]
...more
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
...more
Why would I ask for my sanity from the Devil as I sleep walk, only to give it up again to the Holy Spirit?
...more
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
...more
Compare yourself to a raw wound. Explain that everyone else is one too, whether they know it or not.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tess Taylor about her new collection Work & Days, manual labor, and the lyric possibilities in small fields.
...more
Poet Jennifer Barber discusses loss, identity, historical trauma, and her newest collection, Works on Paper.
...more
The most interesting part of The Witch is that the family is so convinced of humanity’s fallen, sinful nature that it never occurs to them to even look for an aggressor from without.
...more
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet.
...more
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
...more
When I was nine I faked a vision test to get a pair of pale pink cat eyed beauties. Because I wanted them.
...more
When he was five, six, seven, and eight, Max spent most of the summer thinking about the whale, sitting in his room with the shades drawn remembering the first visit and looking forward to the second, just before the new school year.
...more
Distance always seduced me—distance from whatever was most familiar, especially myself—but the difficulties in achieving such remove vexed me.
...more
Ottessa Moshfegh talks about her book McGlue, inventing a character from an 1850s newspaper article, and revisiting her work years after she finished writing it.
...moreThe New Republic has re-published a 1930 interview with a government censor, and it provides an interesting look into the mindset of the man charged with keeping “pollution” out of the hands of “innocent” New Englanders: Why, sometimes it’s the contact of innocence with this filthy stuff that sinks a boy into foul habits for […]
...more