Bright Bright Bright Bright
Joan wants down. She says her arms are tired of holding on.
...more
Posts Tagged: suburbia
Beyond Beowulf: Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife
In this novel, the women control everything.
...more
Meet the Internet’s Strangest Rap Enigma
S’morez is a young rapper from New Jersey with an all but exclusively online presence, and in June last year he put out one of the strangest mixtapes of 2016, The Recipe.
...more
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.
...more
The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka discusses his new collection Map to the Stars, writing about poverty in contemporary poetry, and how racism maintains its place in our society.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The Wild Rumpus (no relation), a children’s bookstore in Minneapolis, was named the bookstore of the year by Publishers Weekly. Minneapolis is also the third most literate city in the US, taking into account the number of bookstores per capita. Unrelated, its also the fourth city for garden gnome appreciation.
...moreWhite Noise
Over at Hazlitt, Morgan Jerkins unpacks our collective literary fascination with white suburban boredom, connecting the historical dots between these dry developments and the redlining that created them, while also highlighting the fact that the at root of boredom is stability and prosperity: According to Martha R. Mahoney of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, […]
...moreSitting Pretty
With a flair for the both the juiciest and most humanizing parts of the story, Soraya Roberts over at Hazlitt pens a sweeping indictment of/love letter to John Hughes: Thirty years on, however, we’ve dropped the rose-coloured glasses, and our response to realizing he sold us out to suburbia echoes Molly Ringwald’s response in Vanity […]
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jensen Beach
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Jensen Beach about his short story collection Swallowed by the Cold, suburbia in Sweden, quiet racism, and writing a series of connected short stories.
...moreRockin’ the Suburbs
The big city may be full of stories, but books like Judy Blume’s Wifey and Karolina Waclawiak‘s The Invaders remind us that the suburbs are equally worth writing about. Over at Electric Literature, Jason Diamond makes the case for settling down.
...more
The Americans by David Roderick
The Americans is no self-help book, no guide to suburban living. Rather, [it] offers all of us a chance to examine the places we make our homes, to remember what these places might mean in the context of American history, and to consider how they might shape American culture.
...moreCheever House
John Cheever is the quintessential suburban novelist. The New Yorker has the story behind the writer’s Ossining, New York house that inspired many of the stories of middle-class, suburban woe.
...more