The Last Essay
In Oliver Sacks’s last published essay, he writes about a patient who underwent surgery to take away his seizures caused by Klüver-Bucy syndrome—and left him with an insatiable appetite: for blocks of...
View ArticleOliver Sacks: Scientist, Seer, Sympathizer
Oliver Sacks brought neuroscience closer to popular understanding and in turn, brought people closer to each other. At The Toast, Laura Passin’s thoughtful tribute to Sacks by way of memoir:What he...
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The Rumpus Interview with Paula Whyman
It’s rare, but sometimes—if I’m very lucky—a fictional character becomes so real to me I feel as if I’ve made an actual friend. This is what happened to me with Miranda Weber, the protagonist of each...
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker and I met in the fall of 2014 in Madison, where we were both fiction fellows at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He was private and a little dour about his work—or was this...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #60: Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes...
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My Voice for Their Drugs
I’m down on my knees again, like I was an hour ago and the hour before that. Here is a large brick building in the middle of a college campus, in the middle of America. Here is where I teach college...
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What to Read When Everyone Is Talking about Healthcare
Health insurance in America may not be perfect, or even close to, but Barack Obama brought us nearer to a fair system that allows access to healthcare for more Americans than we’d ever been. The new...
View ArticleA Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
“Poetry is the closest thing grief has to expression in language,” wrote Ilyse Kusnetz, in a brief note between Carolyn Forché’s eloquent introduction to Angel Bones, and the searing, beautiful poetry...
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Notable Online: 4/12–4/18
Monday 4/13: C Pam Zhang talks with Alice Sola Kim about How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Books Are Magic via Zoom, 7 p.m. EDT, free. Tariq Shah and Lee Clay Johnson discuss Whiteout Conditions....
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Fighting the Weightiness of Metaphors: A Conversation with M. Leona Godin
So much the rather thou, celestial light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from hence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things...
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