Notable Online: 3/21–3/27
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Posts Tagged: Tom Bissell
Notable Los Angeles: 3/12–3/18
Literary events and readings in and around L.A. this week!
...moreNotable Los Angeles: 9/18–9/24
Literary events and readings in and around L.A. this week!
...moreThe Library, and Step on It
Four days ago, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest turned twenty; if you had been reading a page a day since it came out, by now you could have read it over 6.5 times. Despite its age and length, the novel still enjoys massive cultural relevance. Tom Bissell has a Sierpinski-triangle-shaped appraisal of Jest’s legacy: “It […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
With the Senate Intelligence Committee’s online release of their Torture Report summary and Melville House’s announcement last week that it will publish a bound copy of the summary report at the end of this year, torture has been in the air. Even before that, though, the murmurings of what has been going on at Guantánamo […]
...moreAlex Gallo-Brown: The Last Book I Loved, Magic Hours
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the genre for which he has become best known. “Earlier in my career, I was neurotic […]
...moreMaking Sense of the “Floating Cultural Stew”
Over at the L.A. Times, David Ulin argues that the art of the contemporary essay is “in a renaissance.” He praises the recent essay collections of Tom Bissell and Mark Dery, adding them to the ranks of books like Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, Dubravka Ugresic’s […]
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A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
For those of you with literary ambitions, be warned: this book might be painful. You will read A Sense of Direction and recall your confused chasing of said ambition, all that procrastination and thrown time, the (essential but still stinging) aimlessness, and you will realize just how much you sucked at it, how you even […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Tom Bissell
Editor, journalist, memoirist, travel writer, short story writer, humorist, and public intellectual, Tom Bissell is the possessor of enough prizes, recognitions, and stellar reviews to fill a medium-sized moving van.
...moreTaking a Bite of the Digital Madeleine
Near the end of my first date with Mary, the woman who would become my wife and mother to my son, I asked her if she would mind going out with someone who had a thing for video games.
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