This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: Tin House
This Week in Essays
Through her work with Doctors Without Borders, Caitlin L. Chandler offers us a glimpse of what life is like on the Syrian border for Guernica. For Real Life magazine, Christopher Schaberg examines the symbolism of airports as “fraught borderlands” perfect for a protest. Here at The Rumpus, Katharine Coldiron takes our minds for a spin around the concepts of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll discusses his newest collection Transitory, the influence of film on his writing, and getting good news at bad times.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell talks about his new memoir The Accidental Life and his career in the magazine business, which spans the beginning of New Journalism through the digital revolution.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
...moreOn Publishers Big and Small
At the Atlantic, Nathan Scott McNamara provides an optimistic view of the symbiotic relationship between massive corporate publishers and small indie houses. Profiling energetic presses like Graywolf, Coffee House, Two Dollar Radio, and Dorothy, McNamara argues: …by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as […]
...moreMommy Dearest
We have an unfortunate tendency to let motherhood eclipse all aspects of a person’s identity—and then to turn around and call motherhood a faulty aspiration. Luckily there are moms like Antonia Malchik who write anyway, and implore us to remember moms like Elinore Pruitt Stewart, who ventured out onto the Wyoming frontier with her daughter: Why is work like […]
...moreThree Flashes of God
The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this. For its final Flash Friday column, curated by Tin House, the Guardian shares three new excerpts from Joy Williams’s most recent collection, 99 Stories of God.
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The Rumpus Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek
Danniel Schoonebeek discusses living a quiet life in the Catskills, the importance of travel, partying in the woods with poets, and how capitalism forces people to be cruel to each other.
...moreDouse, Rattle, and Roll
There’s a treasure trove of poetry recommendations at Tin House’s Open Bar. Jessica Lakritz’s Sex on Sundaze is alive: she writes her lines on human bodies. One Tin House staff member declares, “Poetry is the hard liquor of literature, and I choose to douse myself in Rattle [the poetry magazine].”
...moreBerliners
I think that everyone writes for an ideal reader. Mine are friends in my heads, some of whom are no longer with me, with us. Darryl Pinckney, author of Black Deutschland, in conversation with Rob Spillman, author of All Tomorrow’s Parties and the editor of Tin House, talks about Berlin before and after the Wall: […]
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A Brief History of Pandering
Erasing women writers like Woolson carries immense implications. It creates an environment ripe for the continued marginalization and silencing of women’s voices today.
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The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott
Elizabeth Byrne reviews The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott today in Rumpus Books.
...moreThe Poetry of Liu Xia
Liu Xia’s burden has become too heavy. Her heart is beginning to fail. In isolation, she can only stare at a tree through her window, a tree that a bird can only dwell on: Is it a tree? It’s me, alone. Is it a winter tree? It’s always like this, all year round. For the Tin […]
...moreBaxter’s Informal Decalogue
For Tin House, Susan Tacent interviews Charles Baxter. The two discuss topics ranging from how to write “funny,” to the process that went into writing Baxter’s most recent collection There’s Something I Want You to Do: Short stories can take so many shapes and forms. In the new book the stories seem to be suggesting that there’s […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Earlier this month, Steven Millhauser released Voices in the Night, a new collection of short stories. On Tuesday, the Boston Globe described the towns of many of the stories in this newest effort as “Millhauserian,” which Eugenia Williamson defines as places where “characters must process their encounters with the uncanny without breaking their rose-colored glasses.” […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction: A Guide to AWP
It’s that time of year again, where writers young and old, from all corners of the country, come to congregate in one gigantic, frenetic, neurotic, alcohol-infused crowd, in a couple of fancy hotels no one can really afford, to stay in and talk shop (or not, depending on how your writing’s been this year). That’s right: […]
...moreA Single Sentence
For Tin House’s blog, Jacob Rubin deconstructs a single sentence from Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Chalk it up to a week where Twitter just felt like too much. Chalk it up to good ol’ nostalgia for the feel of a hefty book in your hands. Or maybe, just chalk it up to an aligning of stars that placed nine exceptional writers under the same roof. If you happen to have […]
...moreA Writer By Any Other Name
For all her artistic clout, critics continue to dismiss Miranda July as “cutesy” and “twee,” labels that reflect an inability to distinguish between her work and her persona. Over at Guernica, Tin House editor Rob Spillman argues in defense of whimsy: Part of the reason that some find July’s literary success so galling is that […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
It’s only February, but 2015 is already proving to be a treasure trove of big happenings in the world of short stories. Take this past Tuesday, when Kelly Link, Charles Baxter, and Neil Gaiman all released new collections, undoubtedly making the world a few orders of magnitude weirder, smarter, and spookier. With Link’s Get in Trouble, […]
...morePen Pals with Eliot and Marx
For the Tin House blog, Heather Hartley spends the holiday season perusing letters between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. Through their love of “good cigars” and a “weakness for making puns,” Eliot and Marx show a humorous affection that inspires Hartley to do some letter writing of her own.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
As the story goes, nearly 100 years ago a group of Surrealist artists gathered together and put a new spin on an old parlor game called Consequences. The meeting resulted in their collective authorship of this phrase: “The/ exquisite/ corpse/ will/ drink/ the/ young/ wine.” Now familiar to many writers by the name of “Exquisite […]
...moreTour Dreaming
Though she’s never been on a book tour herself, poet Lee Upton has a clear idea of what her dream tour would be: “like a cruise in one of those old movies.” She writes about it further on the Tin House blog.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lacy M. Johnson
The Other Side author Lacy M. Johnson talks about the experience of being kidnapped, overcoming trauma, and fighting the George Wills of the world.
...moreBill Murray and Me
Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution. Hence my iron grip […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Coming off the holiday weekend, the trusted dispensary of short fiction, Joyland, published “The History of Hanging Out” by Kevin Mandel. Mandel’s story lives up to its title, encapsulating the bundled, sparking energies of a group of young creators. If you’ve ever started a band or a literary magazine, you’ll recognize yourself and your gang in this […]
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Along Came Polly
I taught Polly at Tin House one year. Or maybe she taught me.
...moreOn Writing the Personal Struggle
For me, the act of writing is all about getting rid of self-criticism, and at the same time I have an almost religious belief in literature. These two kingdoms are impossible to unite. So what I do, apparently, is try to write great literature for four or five years, until the level of frustration becomes […]
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