Clik here to view.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team. That its baseball team...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Last City I Loved: Philadelphia
It’s so goddamn beautiful.It’s so goddamn broken.Both of these things are true of Philadelphia at the same time.A few months after I moved to Philadelphia, I was dating a geologist who liked to “urban...
View ArticleThe 215 Festival Kicks Off!
The 215 Festival, Philadelphia’s premier literary festival kicks off tomorrow, October 18 through Sunday, October 20th.Each day is in a different area of the city.Musician/novelist Wesley Stace, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Robert Repino
If you grew up in the United States, then you probably reached an age, early in your childhood, when American pop culture slammed you like a shockwave—when you suddenly realized that TV commercials and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Last Book I Loved: Station Eleven
Station Eleven is a love letter to technology, one I never could have written myself.Love letters require distance, and when it comes to me and technology, I can’t put any distance between us. I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Odysseus at Telepylos
In August, when you move to Philadelphia, you pack your father’s little sedan to the brim, just as if you were going back to college, and you drive all night through the foggy Appalachian foothills,...
View ArticleThis Week in Indie Bookstores
James Patterson is giving away $2,000,000 in holiday bonuses to bookstore workers and libraries.An adults-only sex shop in Anchorage, Alaska is getting remade into an indie bookstore.Philadelphia’s...
View ArticleGoodbye, Starman
I’ll start with a confession: I first discovered David Bowie in the same unromantic way most kids of my generation did: on commercial rock radio. There’s so much I’ve learned since then about how...
View ArticleThe Changing Face of Philadelphia Media
For The Awl, Andrew Thompson writes on the changing face of local media in Philadelphia, after the close of several local print papers and the rise of Philadelphia magazine.Related Posts:Spelling...
View ArticleDigging Deep into a Jawn
The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Brendan Jones
Brendan Jones’s striking debut novel, The Alaskan Laundry, follows a young woman, Tara Marconi, a former boxer, as she escapes from Philadelphia to Alaska on a journey of self-discovery—adventures...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Asali Solomon
In the moments we begin to read a story for the very first time, it is utterly impossible to know where an author’s influences and aspirations lie. The same may be said of humans—that only when we are...
View ArticleSong of the Day: “Happy Days”
While McCoy Tyner is known far and wide for his indelible influence on jazz piano, his contribution to the genre would still be staggering if he had decided to throw in the towel in 1965, after leaving...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Swinging Modern Sounds #72: Urban Pastoral
Way Out Weather, Steve Gunn’s release from late 2014, has been one of my most consistently favorite albums of the last couple of years. (And maybe it’s exactly a writer’s album, because it was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Podcatcher #3: Poetry Jawns
“If we don’t do it, who will?” Emma Sanders says, and it’s as though a dog whistle has gone off; this is a question I’m intimately familiar with, one I’ve heard many times, and one I’ve asked myself...
View ArticleBringing Diversity to the Comic Book Store World
Ariell Johnson, owner of Amalgam Comics and Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, is the East Coast’s first black female comic book store owner. For CNN, Ryan Bergeron talks with Johnson about opening up the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Robin MacArthur
Robin MacArthur’s debut story collection Half Wild hadn’t even hit the shelves and it already was a New England Book Award Finalist, a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, and an Independent...
View ArticleThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store.One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books.Some people actually like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Those Who Serve
All my life I’d been training to work behind the counter in my Brooklyn coffee shop.Right out of college, my boyfriend and I lived in Hartford, CT, down the street from the Mark Twain House. He...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Bookstore sales continue to grow.In the wake of the presidential election, bookstores are becoming more than just shops and are serving their communities as impromptu community centers.More independent...
View Article
