NYRB
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Digital Ash
Over at the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes apocalyptically about the way our lives are changing for the worse with the advent of the Internet, smartphones, and “the cloud,” infecting every facet of our increasingly public lives. So,…
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Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
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Baldwin’s Paradoxes and Epithets
Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation. Nathaniel Rich, for the New York Review of Books, writes a loving tribute to…
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The Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who did the exact opposite, like Jhumpa Lahiri—all in effort to…
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Serendipity in Life and Literature
Be unpredictable, including to yourself. So there’s the question of how do you go about finding things—or better their finding you? You have to be open to surprise and at the same time assiduous in pursuing the things you are…
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Lorrie Moore on Wisconsin and Steven Avery
Lorrie Moore writes an extensive ode to her weird home state of Wisconsin, and its newest national sensation, the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer. The well-acclaimed Wisconsin author’s viewpoint on the series and its setting is interesting, to say the…
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President Obama, Literary Critic
At the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson shares with us part of a letter written by a young man who would eventually become President Obama, a small piece of literary criticism written in earnest to help his then-girlfriend unpack…
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Strangely in the Middle
If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some…
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Literary Beef: Epistolary Punches Thrown over A Little Life
Hanya Yanigihara’s A Little Life has prompted anguished tears from many a reader—and now, is stoking emotional fires (and a few good burns) in a space that doesn’t often feel impassioned heat: the Letters to the Editor section at the…
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The Continuing Struggles of Mexican-Americans
For many Mexican-Americans, Trump’s campaign is nothing new. It fits within repeating cycles of attraction and rejection for Mexican immigrants in this country and connects with a long history of challenges that citizens of Mexican descent have faced to their…
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A Novel’s Worth in Gold
Can Haruki Murakami write a financially unsuccessful novel at this point in his career? What would it take for him, or a writer with a similar sales history, to fail to sell? And what does this tell us about the…