New York Times
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United Offers Elite Lit Mag of the Skies
What do authors Anthony Doerr, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, and Rick Moody have in common? While The Rumpus is tickled to have featured these illustrious authors within our pages, we can’t say we’ve offered them the opportunity to be read…
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Before Naples
Parthenope was one of the local Sirens who in Book XII of the Odyssey, and many variant versions of the story, sang songs to lure the Greek hero Odysseus to his doom, not anticipating that he would block the seductive…
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NYPL as Budget Hostage
A scathing indictment from Jim Dwyer at the New York Times this week accuses city leaders of depriving funding from the library system, and its mayors of holding the NYPL hostage for leverage in budget negotiations. As Dwyer points out,…
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A Live-In Library
Two Denver booksellers have been saving for the last twenty years to launch the Rocky Mountain Land Library. With more than 32,000 volumes, the couple envision a live-in research institution with a focus on western land, history, industry, and writers.…
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The Fault in Our Sentences
Hit young adult novels may spread like wildfire, but they don’t grow on trees. The Times profiles Julie Strauss-Gabel, a YA editor known for whipping her writers into shape: The last thing you want is an author saying, ‘That’s what’s…
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Why Writers Love to Hate the MFA
Haven’t gotten enough of the MFA debate? Here’s Cecilia Capuzzi Simon in the New York Times.
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Riding With the Queen
Over at the New York Times, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles Toni Morrison in a tremendous essay: Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in order to do the work. The work “protects,” she told…
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Shakespeare on the Verrazano
In 2013 Ross Williams began an ambitious project: film all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 154 different New York City locations, and reach “beyond the restrictions of a live performance in a small theater.” Now the project has taken a…
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In the Batcave with Robert Moses
If you’ve been curious about Robert Moses but put off by the sheer heft of volumes like The Power Broker, a forthcoming comic book rendering of the master builder’s reign is a fun new option. The book, titled Robert Moses,…
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Make Them Pay
They say print journalism is dying because it’s inconvenient and expensive. At the Atlantic, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti makes a case for jacking up the price even more.
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A “Voiceless” India
For the New York Times, Aatish Taseer argues that English has left Indian literature “voiceless,” as writers are often asked to produce work with western audiences in mind: India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua…
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Keeping Up with Cortázar
Over at the Times, Hugo Passarello chronicles Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch through a revolving photo essay; in his own way, Passarello bridges the gap between written text and daily living (or at least does his best to keep up with Cortázar).