Learning to Grow Where Planted: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones
Part of looking closer is seeing what is hard to face, and part of having courage is addressing what seems futile.
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Posts Tagged: Ohio
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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It’s Fine, It’s Good, It’s Beautiful
And the trees—each positioned in corner windows in the front of the house—they will be the talk of the neighborhood. This is how a house becomes a home.
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Carving Out Enough Space on the Cloud: Talking with Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib discusses They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, honoring survival by showing up, and refusing to be governed by genre.
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
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A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith discusses her new collection Good Bones, how motherhood has changed her writing, and what it felt like to have a poem go viral.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A weekly roundup of indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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The Single Most Important Thing: Talking Sports and Writing with Sridhar Pappu
Sridhar Pappu discusses his first book, The Year of the Pitcher, writing it over six years, and the roots of his baseball fandom.
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Gentrification Looks Like Us: Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris
Harris thoughtfully examines what happens when privilege and lack of privilege are forced to coexist in the same neighborhood—and, occasionally, in the same apartment.
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Words as Events: A Conversation with Jeff Wood
Jeff Wood discusses The Glacier, his genre-bending book combining novel, poetry, screenplay, and collage, how heritage has become a brand, and the American Midwest.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
This Los Angeles bookstore is confronting censorship in Iran with a focus on books banned in the nation. Zhongshu Bookstore in China is designed to wow customers with its bold interior.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Lisa Factora-Borchers
Lisa Factora-Borchers talks about being a Catholic feminist, writing across genres, and pushing back against a singular narrative about New York.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Amazon’s revolutionary new way to sell books in a physical brick and mortar store, has opened in New York City. Everyone old is new again. Even chain bookstores, like the UK’s Waterstones, thrives because of booksellers’ personal touches, like book recommendations.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Hello
All those prank calls were partly a way of taking control of the unknown, the ambiguity of that space between “hello” and whatever comes next.
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The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Claudia Cortese Discusses Wasp Queen
Poet Claudia Cortese talks about her new book Wasp Queen and Lucy, the rebellious 90s teen whose voice inspired the collection.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Loganberry Books in Cleveland, Ohio is drawing attention to female authors by turning books by men around on the shelves, leaving the books pages out to hide the spine. A Pittsburgh bookstore is providing a home to books by writers in exile, drawing attention to the authors’ works. The collapse of the coloring book market is hurting […]
...moreAlbum of the Week: Sinkane’s Life & Livin’ It
Take a musician born in London, raised for a time in Sudan, and relocated to Ohio at five years old. Have his parents make him listen to Bob Marley, and let him eventually discover great Afrobeat like William Onyeabor, and Pharoah Sanders’s legendary saxophone. Here is how we get to Ahmed Gallab, the mastermind behind Sinkane, who […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Everything We Ever Needed
I tried to forget again that I once meant to leave, that on a few occasions I had actually felt transported by love.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with J.D. Vance
J.D. Vance talks about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the perils of upward mobility, and never forgetting where you come from.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
...moreAfter Adderall Meets Columbus, Ohio
Attention all Columbus Ohio residents! Tomorrow night, September 14, at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus, Ohio, there will be a screening of Stephen Elliott’s new film, After Adderall. This is a one-night only event, so be there!
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The Middle Season
My doctor told me to begin with adding five minutes to my morning walk. During those five minutes, I recalled the life I’d once had—that intense life that ambition gave me—and the man I’d once been.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Mike Adams’s Uncompromising Taste
This stuff is my favorite drink in the world, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Athens, Georgia is home to a new radical bookstore, Bombs Away Books. The anarchist bookshop not only sells books, but is a DIY music venue featuring punk shows. A specialty bookstore dedicated to self-published authors is ready to open in Florida. P. J. Boox Bookstore in Fort Myers will be a standalone brick-and-mortar shop where […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Les Standiford
Prolific writer and Director of the FIU Creative Writing Program Les Standiford takes a look back at his career in books, including Water to the Angels and Bringing Adam Home, and tells us what’s next.
...moreThe University Press That Doesn’t Exist
As part of austerity measures, the University of Akron eliminated its university press. The director and two staff members were both let go as part of budget-trimming layoffs. The press focused on regionally significant publications that chronicled Ohio history, culture and poetry. As Inside Higher Ed reveals, once people noticed that the press had been […]
...morePedal-Powered Libraries
Huron, Ohio has a new library branch. Unlike the existing libraries, this one is mounted on a tricycle. The innovative library contains a foldout display case mounted between its wheels.
...moreDispatches from the Rust Belt
Morning Edition interviews writer and journalist David Giffels about his new book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Giffels writes about his choice to remain in Akron, Ohio when everyone around him seemed to be leaving, including LeBron James. From the NPR interview: LeBron James and I are, I think, the […]
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The Last City I Loved: Los Angeles (or How I Traveled the NY-LA Fault Line and Got Home)
I always had the sense that I was American but never more so than when I moved from New York to California over twenty years ago.
...more“Heck yes I’m willing to do this, I love peanut butter!”
Have you been searching for a collection of peanut-butter related news to no avail? Look no further: There’s a peanut-butter craving thief on the prowl in Ohio, who comes into a gas station most evenings after midnight and “snatches Reese’s peanut butter cups.” Last Tuesday, he upped his game, grabbing his usual sweets and then […]
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