obituaries
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Straining Toward “Memory Care”: Victoria Chang’s Obit
For Chang, figurative language proves unsatisfactory when compared to the depth of her grief.
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That Constant Movement: A Conversation with Luis Othoniel Rosa
Luis Othoniel Rosa discusses his novel, DOWN WITH GARGAMEL!.
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Interrogating Grief: A Converstion with Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang discusses her new poetry collection, OBIT.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #62: Julian Tepper
Upon publication of his first novel, Balls, author Julian Tepper received pointed advice from one Philip Roth: quit. What the elder statesman, on the verge of his own retirement, was trying to say is that the writing life is “just…
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Great Obituaries
How does it feel to be in charge of writing about the deaths of outstanding people? Over at the Paris Review, Margalit Fox tells us about her twenty years (and twelve hundreds obituaries) at the New York Times.
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Lost Words For A Spruce Tree
Over at The Hairpin, Isabelle Fraser interviews Ann Wroe, obituary writer for The Economist. Wroe has written obituaries for J.D. Salinger, Aaron Swartz, and the 25-year old carp that was “England’s best-loved fish”. On Marie Smith, the last person to speak Eyak, an…
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Writing “the very stuff of life”
Today in unusual writing jobs: an inside look at what it’s like to be an obituary news writer for the New York Times. Each day, it is our job to come to know such strangers intimately, inhaling their lives through…
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Mr. Bad News Who?
It can be a harrowing experience, Whitman knows, requiring that the writer become an instant historian, assessing in a few hours the dead man’s life with lucidity, accuracy, and objectivity. Gay Talese believes “Mr. Bad News” is one of the…
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The Sky Below
A.J. Liebling once remarked that the authors of newspaper obituaries are “a frustrated and usually anonymous tribe.” That’s certainly true of Gabriel Collins, narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s unusual new novel, The Sky Below.