susan sontag
-
Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
-
Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell
Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.
-
Periphery: Exploring Bombs, Boundaries, and Family History
Have you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?
-
There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
-
The Aura of Baby Einstein, the Child, the Toy
If there is no distinction between show and commercial, ethics and entertainment, what kind of distinctions, if any, exists between her imaginary play, her consumer life, and our reality?
-
Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
-
You Can’t Be a Snob with Bad Teeth: Talking with David Sedaris
David Sedaris discusses his new collection of diary entries, Theft By Finding, his love for book signings, and his inevitable return to IHOP.
-
Oscars Flub as Grand Finale for Camp
On the Hollywood stage—amidst gasps, jaw drops, and pearl clutches—we witnessed one final, beautifully coded failure and an over-the-top dethroning of the serious.
-
On Suffering and Sympathy
What is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?
-
The Ordinary Extraordinary
In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and…
-
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Lucy Dacus’s Journals
What I write in my journals is a personal record of the events in my life, and my reactions to them.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Brian Blanchfield
Poet and writer Brian Blanchfield talks about his essay collection Proxies, touring in support of a prose collection versus a poetry collection, and frottage.