New York Times
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This Week in Essays
For the office drones struggling to come back after the four-day weekend, take heart in James Livingston’s essay for Aeon considering whether work is necessary in our present age. Here at The Rumpus, Helen Betya Rubinstein expresses a sense of dislocation that’s…
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The Digital Dictator
I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night –Roman emperor Gaius Caligula (AD 12–AD 41). Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.…
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Reimagining The Tempest
How to create a credible contemporary novel from a work written four centuries ago for the stage? In a New York Times Book Review, author Emily St. John Mandel reviews Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The…
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New Scares
Happy day after Halloween! For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty reviews a variety of chilling fiction, and delves deep into why these are exceptional: The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression…
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Lois Lowry on Lord of the Flies
Lois Lowry takes to the New York Times with her story of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at age sixteen, and how her perspective on its portrayal of children and violence has (and hasn’t) changed in…
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Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides in Conversation
I only have a curiosity, an interest, a love, and that’s it, really. At the New Yorker, Michele Moses shares a video clip from the 2016 New Yorker Festival featuring writers Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation about their…
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Hitler’s Ghostwriter
New evidence uncovered by history professor and researcher Thomas Weber indicates that Hitler himself wrote the 1923 biography Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, which is credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerbe. Weber’s research implies that Hitler had designs…
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The Other Half
By forcing blue-state liberal types to reckon with a demographic they had long dismissed as a punch line—low-income, uneducated whites in economically depleted regions—he [Donald Trump] awakened them to the fact that the groovy progressive social values they had assumed were…
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Beyond “The Lottery”
Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who…
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A Weird and Wonderful World
In a New York Times book review of Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, Hermione Hoby writes: Like an alien intent on some meticulous anthropological mission on Earth, Alexandra Kleeman seems always to be encountering the world for the first…
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We Love You, Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge, author most recently of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books) provides her take on Lionel Shriver’s recent remarks at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival for the New York Times. Greenidge recalls writing her first novel in which there was an…
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Omniscience Is In
In a New York Times article, Elliott Holt writes about how omniscience is making a comeback in contemporary fiction. She writes: The effects of omniscience are authority and scope; novels with such narrators seem especially confident. The characters may be…