Purity Forthcoming
Jonathan Franzen will release another sweeping narrative titled Purity in September of next year, to the edification of serious intellectuals nationwide. While Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux president...
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Purity by Jonathan Franzen
In Purity, Jonathan Franzen offers up a cast of characters who find themselves in moral peril and must choose how to respond. Some do the right thing, often at the expense of happiness. Some manage to...
View ArticleLiberty, Justice
From Freedom to Purity, there’s no denying the man likes his themes. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon reviews Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming novel:Does Franzen truly believe his readers need to...
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Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
I suspect that everyone is always rewriting something or other, whether they are self-conscious about it or operating intuitively. It’s probably endemic to the literary impulse to wish to transform the...
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Against Realism
Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.–Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”What is the real world, Lenu, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can...
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Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas
Do novels think?Epigrams that land with authority and portentous titles like Franzen’s Freedom and Purity simulate thinking, and they’re ubiquitous. There are writers who create plots around...
View ArticleWires Crossed
By this point, the relationship between books and television is complicated enough to merit its own Netflix series. Or its own book. Or maybe both:Like lovers who share an apartment, they’ve started...
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The Language of What Happened to Us
I was in college, engaged and planning my wedding, and back home in Virginia on the last break I would have before I finished finals and returned for my wedding. The twelve-year-old I was babysitting...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal about their co-edited anthology, Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church (Epiphany Publishing, November 2019), the importance of...
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