You Don’t Finish Anything, You Just Turn Away
Over at Granta, Sam Lipstye and Diane Cook chat about spontaneity, artistic permanence, and how time travel’s actually a bit of a burden:I would love to make minor adjustments to most of the sentences...
View ArticleA Story to See You Through
Etgar Keret and Sasha Kayua have had a pretty busy year: after speaking out against Israeli intolerance, and getting snubbed on every front, the pair turned to penning their viewpoints to each other....
View ArticleSteady Dissonance
Teju Cole’s got a penchant for prose that lingers; over at The New Inquiry, he delivers once again:When I have a nap or something, J.D. said, and I fall asleep (these words in English, all of a sudden,...
View ArticleAnother Story to Guide You
Over at the New Yorker, Etgar Keret and Sayed Kashua continue their conversation:I believe that this despair is temporary, and that even though there are quite a few political elements that would...
View ArticleLittle Traveler
In support of his new memoir, Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart’s been touring the country. Lucky for us, he’s keeping a journal:Philip Roth, in a 2000 interview with David Remnick in the pages of this...
View ArticleApollo Revisited
Tom Hanks (yeah, that one), lands his short fiction debut over at the New Yorker:I’ve been around great storytellers all my life and, like an enthusiastic student, I want to tell some of my own. And I...
View ArticleLeaving Lebanon
Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine gets the profile treatment at NYRB:Many of the funniest moments in Alameddine’s work—and he is essentially a comic writer—revolve around the difficulties of trying to...
View ArticleCity Resolution
Author Chris Colin finally brought his daughter to New York, after years and years away, and it may as well have been a new city:I began seeing grand indifference everywhere. The immigrant struggles...
View ArticleHasta la Madre
At the New Yorker, Francisco Goldman tackles the malaise shadowing his favorite city in the world:Mexico City feels different these days. Its usual vibrancy has been muted, and not only because of the...
View ArticleDuly Sympathetic
Over at BOMB, Claudia Rankine takes a look at the way we use our words:Tone is an everyday kind of maneuver. It disrupts and communicates aggression, disgust, dis- respect, and humor, among a myriad of...
View ArticleWhat We Eventually Remember
Over at PEN, Emily St. John Mandel chats about forming an identity:I’d been a dancer all my life but didn’t really want to dance anymore. I spent a great deal of time scheming desperately to get back...
View ArticleLoose Notes
Gil-Scott Heron was a man of many fragments, and Marcus Baram is intent on unearthing all of them:Gil did marathon writing sessions, staying up for days, taking a break every once in a while to play...
View ArticleA Proper Fake
Wells Towers gives GQ yet another essay. His subject this time? The most prolific counterfeiter in American history, Frank Bourassa:Frank’s self-image may be described as not merely healthy but...
View ArticleStanding Ovation
Over at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh gives Chris Rock the profile treatment. Sanneh touches on the business of comedy, dueling aesthetics, and the trouble with staying relevant in an age of...
View ArticleA Losing Game
I imagined if I had been writing in the 1950s and 1960s, I, too, may have been writing for the pulps. I got the sense that [Jim] saw me as a kindred spirit, that I reminded him of himself as a...
View ArticleFrom a Distance
Over at The Believer, Zack Rogow and Renee Morel have unearthed French novelist Colette’s advice column for the forlorn:You who love “madly,” have you decided, accepted, that one day love will...
View ArticleNative Transplant
Rumpus contributor J. Ryan Stradal edited the recently published California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Gold State, Number 2. The anthology’s goal? To find the best new practitioners of...
View ArticleThe Lower Forty-Eight
Dave Eggers has a new story up at the New Yorker:There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing admirable things in the light of day, years of good work, and afterward being tired and content and...
View ArticleWhat Was Left
Down at Grantland, Brian Phillips gives us an elegy in search of sumo, closure, and the lasting ennui of Yukio Mishima:It’s a dream city, Tokyo. I mean that literally, in that I often felt like I was...
View ArticleBlind Lie
Over at The New Republic, Hanna Rosin pens a piece on her buddy, Stephen Glass—former Republic colleague, one-time prodigy, and probably the most lucrative fabricator in recent journalistic history:I...
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