The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one of them, you might start here.
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“My desires had now become too big, the call to a larger life too loud to be easily hushed.” As her children age and her identity as a Mother shifts, the author must step outside the safety of an outgrown marriage.
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Here’s hoping you were too busy attending panels and buying Write Like A Motherfucker mugs at this year’s AWP to read The Rumpus this weekend. And here’s hoping you’ll read the two spectacular essays we ran right now.
The first is a piece about binges—on food, drugs, exercise, anything, everything—by Chloe Caldwell.
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Gary Lutz’s new collection, divorcer, tells seven stories of divorce that will captivate every reader―single, married or divorced.
His loneliness lay around me like a fence. The promise was that once I solved the loneliness the fence would dissipate. But I couldn’t solve it.
“The earth was crowded with people who would never try to find me if I disappeared. A person is missing only if another person misses them.”
A metaphorical review of Tony Hoagland’s Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, in which Johnny Rocket, Britney Spears, and the Saudi Monarchy play a crucial role in American poetry.
Kurt Caswell’s award-winning essays channel Phillip Lopate and David Foster Wallace, while exploring the plight of a “mountain man” stuck in a paved-over world.In the current issue of The Atlantic, the newly-divorced Sandra Tsing Loh wonders out loud “isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?” but then holds off a little from answering that question directly in order to do a characteristically amusing roundup review of five recent and not-so-recent books about marriage and divorce: Marriage-Go-Round, The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, Open Marriage, Why Him?
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