2014
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Notable Portland: 9/25–10/1
Thursday 9/25: Two decades after his debut collection, Tony Earley is back with his new short story collection, Mr. Tall. Powell’s City of Books, 7:30 p.m., free. Friday 9/26: David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, comes to town with his…
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Batman Saves More than Gotham
What does it take to transcend your medium into the stuff of literary value? Batman. 1986, the year both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were first published, can be seen as a turning point for the comic book in…
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A Teen’s Perspective
The Los Angeles Review of Books has posted “an honest review from a teen’s perspective” about The Fault in Our Stars.
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Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
Amy Letter reviews Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher today in Rumpus Books.
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The Ugly Side
At The Toast, Caitlin Keefe Moran writes about the difficult women in the long-forgotten work of Nancy Hale: The Prodigal Women, now sadly out of print, is a strange, giant, wonderful book, full of desperate, sad, sometimes wicked, sometimes pitiable,…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Hold everything, Lonesome George is on display in New York! A short history of European animal trials. Look I know that Christmas Island SOUNDS nice, but I promise you it’s crawling in crabs. Important news: Curiosity found a weird ball.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Jane Rosenberg LaForge discusses her new book An Unsuitable Princess, being a New York writer from L.A., and how women get short shrift in fairy tales.
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Poetic Side-Effects
A 76-year-old woman suffering from epileptic seizures was placed on medication with an unusual side-effect: the compulsion to write poetry. The condition, known as hypergraphia, led the woman to write 10 to 15 poems per day. Her urges have since…
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Amis, Oates, and the Foul-Smelling Meadow
Recent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one…
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Word of the Day: Flosculation
(n); an embellishment or ornament in speech; to speak in flowery language; c. 1651 Trouble. Trouble is a great dustpan of a word. Its roots are found in Latin in the verb turbidare, to make turbid … Trouble branched off…
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Albums of Our Lives: Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads’ Rock Immortal
The driving force of the album is the character Dory Tourette, part invented alter ego, part self-mythologized caricature of frontman Dory Ben-Shalom…
