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November 2025
By Ed Simon In the Venn Diagram that demonstrates the relationship between Rust Belt Magazine and The Pittsburgh [...]
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“Noises Off” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater
“Noises Off is a delicate and complicated machine of a play, and director Margot Bordelon has assembled its many moving parts with finesse.”
“Art is [still] a Weapon”: A Brief History of the Protest Novel
“Every time he saw another building in Pittsburgh being spray washed to remove the decades of soot… he would think of their legacies being slowly erased.”
Unruly Humor: Damon Young on the Truth in Black Humor
“That this is bloody and Black-as-fuck honesty is where the best comedy is born. It’s lowbrow. It’s midbrow, it’s highbrow. It’s every brow.”
December 2025
By Ed Simon As temperatures drop and the days get shorter, with the end of [...]
Inside Stewart O’Nan’s Eclectic Imagination
“Every city is about change—even Pittsburgh, which for so long we thought of as stuck or static.”
The Afterlife of Gertrude Stein
Walking through Gertude Stein’s biographical and literary legacy with devotion in Francesca Wade’s “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.”
King Cool: Ed Ochester and The Pittsburgh School of Poetry
A celebration of Ed Ochester’s life and legacy reveals how a poet from Queens transformed Pittsburgh’s literary scene.
In Search of Lost Process; or, How I Wrote My First Book
“I was young, full of creative energy, filling black notebooks with pressed ballpoint ink. Time dilated because I was unbothered by the reality of lugging my dirty laundry down to the laundromat every few weeks or eating rice and beans day after day.”
“First Lady” at PICT Classic Theatre
“The play is set in a ‘modern banana republic’ in a vaguely defined Mesopotamia, in the midst of a popular uprising against an oppressive authoritarian president.”
The Language Equation
A conversation with Patrick McGinty on new language, narration, and queer identity in his new novel “Town College City Road.”
Meaning and Michigan in Cal Freeman
“Yet Freeman’s musings on language are more than melancholy; they take the reader on a metaphysical investigation of language itself.”
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