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.
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Posts Tagged: suburbs
Misfits and Marriage: Talking with Taylor Larsen
Taylor Larsen discusses her debut novel, Stranger, Father, Beloved, writing about New England, falling in love with her characters, and the surprises of debut authorship.
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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.
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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.
...moreJohn Cheever Could Never Be a Single Mother
John Cheever, known as the “Chekov of the suburbs” for his fiction’s signature focus on the domestic, suburban family life in the 40s and 50s, probably couldn’t hack being a single mom today. At McSweeney’s, Jeanne Darst shares the excerpts from Cheever’s fiction that pretty much hit this head on the nail.
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Breaking and Burning
They pin him down and I stick him. I am relentless. This disease is relentless. And I am so pissed off.
...moreHow A Neighborhood is Made
For The Towner, Chantal Clarke muses on the in-betweenness of her childhood home of Pelham, New York and “the day-to-day policing of boundaries” that make up the seedy work of orchestrating a neighborhood—how it was not New York City; not Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx; not a suburb in the vacant, car-dependent sense; and […]
...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.
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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.
...moreWhen a Writer Becomes an Adjective
Kafka. Joyce. Woolf. Dickens. Nabokov. All of these writers have become adjectives. (Arguably, “Kafkaesque” is the most overused one of the mix. And “Nabokovian” the least-earned moniker.) Just last April, a prolific and prophetic English writer by the name of J.G. Ballard died. At some point in the cultural multiverse, he too became an adjective […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #13: On Loops
These lines depend on your having a working knowledge of the New York City suburbs.
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