Peak Dystopia
Adam Sternbergh, author of Dystopian novel Shovel Ready, asked whether readers are burning out on the Dystopian novel. He goes as far as suggesting that perhaps the next great novel…
Posts by tag
Utopia
22 posts
Weekly Geekery
Examining the troubled origins of our search for technological utopia. Autocorrect is our favorite fall guy for texting errors, but it’s also the reason you can text. What is worth…
Paradise Locked
In anticipation of this past week’s Hay Festival, fiction luminary Toni Morrison wrote an essay for The Telegraph examining the concept of paradise as it relates to race and class.…
MaddAddam Is Coming
If you, like us, are drooling in anticipation for the conclusion to literary empress (and Rumpus interviewee!) Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, well, mop up your chin and then check out…
The Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia. Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But…
The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Groff
Anyone who knows Lauren Groff’s fiction would not be surprised to find that as a child in upstate New York her favorite stories were Brothers Grimm fairy tales, and by…
The Utopian Project
“In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea.” Charles Simic writes on Poetry and Utopia for the New…
How To Give a F$@#
Some days everything goes wrong. Like today, when I called the NYTBR the NYTRB on Twitter, or when I linked to the wrong thing on the book blog roundup, or…
Utopia, What Are You Good For?
“But the question lingers: Apart from its questionable value as a marketing strategy, what is utopia good for?” Paul La Farge at Bookforum on the concept and uses of utopia,…
The Pinup Promised-Land
Still warm in her grave, Bettie Page’s mid-century pinup appeal is unlikely to cool off anytime soon. Artist Lauren Bergman puts pinups like Bettie on a pedestal,