Improve your prose with Math
Alright fiction writers, put down your pens for a moment and let’s talk math.If you recoil when hearing the “M-word” or brace your index fingers into a cross at the sight of algebra or calculus...
View ArticleA Postcard from David Foster Wallace
In the current age of Twitter and Facebook, some authors seem just one click away–a kind of celebrity that is still accessible to the common fan.Frank Cassese tells a story in Guernica about when he...
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“Both Flesh and Not,” by David Foster Wallace
The ferocity with which scholars, writers, fans, and cultural critics explicate the legacy of David Foster Wallace, or even that a legacy is thought to already exist at all, strikes me as a bit absurd,...
View ArticleBooks Elissa Bassist Thinks You Should Read
The Equals Record asks Funny Women editor (and writer/motherfucker) Elissa Bassist what she’s reading offline.She responds with a whole shelf’s worth of books, from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, DFW!
Happy Birthday, David Foster Wallace! You would have been 51 today.To celebrate the life of one the most brilliant contemporary writers, re-read Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist’s piece “A Baker’s...
View ArticleThe Course Syllabi of Famous Writers
Imagine if the authors who created these syllabi for their courses were all teaching at the same school at the same time.“Who’d you get for English?”“David Foster Wallace. I hear he’s a hard grader....
View ArticleNew DFW Books: Both A Good Idea and Not
Both Flesh and Not, the latest posthumous David Foster Wallace book, has been released, and Rumpus pal Andrew Altschul has written an extensively titled essay about it for the Quarterly Conversation.In...
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“Possibility: Essays Against Despair,” by Patricia Vigderman
I like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two...
View ArticleFrom Alcoholic to Diet Cokehead
In an interview with addiction website The Fix, reprinted at Salon, memoirist and poet Mary Karr discusses getting clean, flouting rules, and how sobriety shaped her relationship with David Foster...
View ArticleWords of Wisdom from Writers
It’s commencement speech season, and New York Daily News‘s books blog has a roundup of some of the best graduation advice from literary figures. Like this, from Toni Morrison:…art takes us and makes us...
View ArticleRemembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life.Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a...
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Bough Down by Karen Green
Strangers feel free to e-mail:Nobody knew you before your husband took his life.Nobody knew me, nobody knew me. I think this maybe true.Karen Green’s husband was a famous novelist. A Great Writer. His...
View ArticleNotable Chicago 11/10–11/16
Sunday 11/10: Join hosts J.H. Palmer and Angela Benander for That’s All She Wrote, the west side’s favorite BYOB storytelling show. This month’s featured storytellers include Angelina Marie, Xavier...
View ArticleGrammar Master David Foster Wallace
The interview was a byproduct of an article Wallace started in the late nineties on the grammar wars. Most writers think of grammar as uninteresting, the machine code of literature, but Wallace loved...
View ArticleThe Cliché of Leadership
Think about it. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with ‘inspire’ being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A...
View ArticleWords as Art: The 2014 Whitney Biennial
The 2014 Whitney Biennial opened last week, and runs through May 25th. Word-lovers who find themselves in NYC while the exhibit is running will want to pay a visit. From the New York Times:Paper is a...
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A Book About The Internet
Smartphones are ruining our brains[1] and how we interact with one another.[2] Internet porn is killing sex and, consequently, relationships.[3] Facebook gives us depression.[4] Or: the Internet will...
View ArticleThe Evils of Irony
At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge. The...
View ArticlePublic (Image) Domain
What happens when the reproduction rights of literary works and an author’s public image are taken out of their owner’s control, but without any law infringement?Over at the Paris Review, Evan Kindley...
View ArticleWord of the Day: Recrudescence
(n.) breaking out afresh or into renewed activity; from the Latin recrudescere (“to become raw again”)The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones...
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