If you liked David Biepsiel’s State of American Poetry address, here’s a nice counterpart by Natasha Trethewey at the Virginia Quarterly Review. “Despair about the place of poetry in American…
To many Americans, fashion is a frivolous distraction. To many women in Namibia, it’s an expression of identity hammered out of years of tradition, culture, colonialism, and genocide. Catherine E.…
What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer…
Here’s something to look forward to: Anne Helen Petersen’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” column, which we blogged about previously, is becoming a book! If you simply can’t wait for the…
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts): 1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his…
With newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse:…
The Rumpus’s own Michelle Orange has a contribution in the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s most recent issue. The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion…