“Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself…many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her father for his biographer, but who was Leslie Stephen, exactly?
Family Tree
Whodunnit
And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down "a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived."
Long Lists of Everything
“I started keeping a journal when I was eight, but even before then I was a kid who loved making long lists of everything I could see or remember. Coconut, tricycle, jeepney, air freshener, I would write, for example, and my lists would lengthen and become even more specific as I grew to know the world around me. […] Reading and writing always seemed a part of my life and identity.” For The Rumpus, Swati Khurana interviews Janine Joseph about writing poems as teenagers, writing from experience, and what it meant for Joseph to “come out” as an undocumented immigrant.
New Elmore Leonard Stories on the Way
Jennifer Schuessler reports that a book of unpublished Elmore Leonard stories will be published in 2015. In 2010, our own Bill Morris touched on one element of what made Leonard’s writing so special.
Celebrity Lecture Series
WARNING: Do not visit the website for Michigan State's Celebrity Lecture Series unless you have a substantial amount of free time to kill. Before you even need to scroll down, you have access to audio from Edward Albee, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, and Pat Conroy.
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“The heat of autumn / is different from the heat of summer.”
With the help of Flora Coker, the Poetry Foundation created an animated reading of Jane Hirshfield’s “The Heat of Autumn.”
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Five Favorite Story Collections
Curtis Sittenfeld shares her favorite short story writers, from Alice Munro to new voice Jennine Capo Crucet.
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100 Notable Disappointments
I'm relieved to see I've actually read some of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2011. But Rumpus writer Roxane Gay, is pretty disappointed.
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