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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Posts Tagged: road trip
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #58: James Steven Sadwith
A self-described “actor’s director,” James Steven Sadwith has been writing, directing, and producing television movies, miniseries, and dramas for nearly three decades—and is perhaps best known for his work on the lives of Frank Sinatra and Elvis. But for Coming through the Rye, his first feature film for the big screen, Sadwith comes closer to […]
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Natural Born Drivers
He only knew that the Blazer, like the green card, was something he wanted my brother and me to have, so that we knew we deserved things, things like America.
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FUNNY WOMEN #139: Gap Year To-Do List
Water is a precious resource; my portable soda stream honors that fact.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Motel Ecstasy
Alia Volz’s artist, expat mom needed to leave Mexico and go back to the United States for a heavy-duty chemo treatment, which meant it was time for a mother-daugther road trip.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
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The Last Book I Loved: Beautiful Ruins
I’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
...moreMapping Literary Road Trips
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books featured include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Acid […]
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Armored in Cars and Driving Unseen
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
...moreSong of the Day: “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo”
Road trip songs occupy a plush seat in the American canon—right underneath the fuzzy dice. They are often harbingers of summer, and “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” is no exception. This prototypical Tribe Called Quest track from their first album features a playful and engaging narrative from standout MC, Q-Tip. Samples from the Chambers Brothers track, […]
...moreMy Saga, Part I
Karl Ove Knausgaard took an American road trip. Here’s his first installment at the New York Times Magazine.
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On the Road Again
What gives the road movie (or, more broadly, the epic voyage) its staying power across cultures and time is an intrinsic narrative structure with a built-in beginning and end in the form of a starting point and destination.
...moreIndie Bookstore Road Trip
Independent bookstores will save the world, or at least the publishing industry, maybe. Josh Weil and Mike Harvkey took a road trip across the country, exploring independent bookstores. They found a collection of dedicated shops and local literary communities, but that didn’t answer the fundamental question: how important are independent bookstores are to writers? An […]
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