Here’s a video of Bill Murray reading two poems by Wallace Stevens. (As if you needed further evidence that Murray is a national treasure.)
Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens
LeBron James, Cleveland and the Personal Essay
"No one in his or her right mind would read James’s essay in order to vouch for or against its literary quality, but I am here to do just that." Ryan Lejarde parses LeBron James's "I'm Coming Home" for The Rumpus and comes to myriad conclusions about sports, literature, and what it means to love Cleveland.
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Grocery Shopping with Jess Walter
“I didn’t want to like Jess Walter.” Ann K. Ryles interviews Jess Walter about his new short story collection We Live in Water, fatherhood, poverty, and what he daydreams about while waiting in line at the grocery store at The Rumpus.
Conquest of Panic
Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Howe writes, "His great subject, I think, was panic." Our own Michael Bourne recently answered this question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.
The Top Journalism of the Decade
A group at NYU's journalism school has named "The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States." Four of these are books: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.
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NYPL Gets Trippy
The New York Public Library has bought psychedelic guru Timothy Leary's papers. The 335 boxes contain journals, videotapes, photographs and thousands of letters from avid trippers, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and, yes, Cary Grant.