2014
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Notable NYC: 12/13–12/19
Saturday 12/13: Millions March New York City/Day of Anger in response to the police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and others. Washington Square Park, 2 p.m., free. Jon Cotner guides a tour through his community for the…
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A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father by Harmony Holiday
Kent Shaw reviews Harmony Holiday’s A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father today in Rumpus Poetry.
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
It’s hard to remember why I was silent. Maybe, like some of the women only now reporting they were raped by Bill Cosby decades ago, I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.
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Who Was Your First Kiss?
At the New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott covers “A Brief History of Kissing in Movies.”
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Prison Rehabilitation
We’ve been thoroughly trained to not have empathy for people who’ve been convicted of violent offenses—even though that could mean many things, and I believe all of us have the capacity to do violence. People have also been trained to…
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The Martyr Story
What does Beloved have in common with The Hunger Games? How is the biopic Milk like Gone with the Wind? According to Amit Majmudar, they’re all variants of “the martyr story.” For the Kenyon Review blog, Majmudar explains our continued fascination…
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Good Victims
We couldn’t remember his name. We couldn’t remember what he looked like. We couldn’t remember how many there were. We changed our story as we began to remember more details. We changed our story into something we could live with.…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday, Joyland published “You Said ‘Always’” an excerpt from Ester Bloom’s novel-in-progress, The Sex Lives of Other People. In the story, which has the momentous feel of the novel’s opening, the narrator, Annie, gets dumped by her boyfriend after…
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The Last Book I Loved: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Bernadette Fox is awesome, but she is also kind of losing it, and I get it.
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The Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box…
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Notable Chicago: 12/12–12/18
Saturday 12/13: City Lit hosts a reading and signing by Chicago teacher and writer Jessie Ann Foley, who’s promoting her first novel, The Carnival at Bray. 5 p.m. Unabridged Books invites you to its holiday party. 5 p.m. Students from the…
