November 2015
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On Ladies’ Creative Pursuits
There are certain stereotypes about women’s creativity prior to the twentieth century, and generally they revolve around appropriately domestic novels, amateur watercolors, needlework, and “folk art.” But there’ve always been women who found ways around those rules. For Pictorial at…
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Androidish Spy Paraphernalia
The New York Times brought together two distinctly imaginative authors, George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, for a chat on writing the future, their famously fabulist impulses, and the core of why we turn to literature at all.
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How Gone Is My Valley?
It does us all a disservice to separate the Valley’s current industrial action from that of its natural environment, human history and broader political context.
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Remembering Those Lost at Le Bataclan
In the wake of the tragedy that occurred in Paris this weekend, the identities of victims from the shooting at the Le Bataclan venue, where the Eagles of Death Metal were playing, have begun to surface. Read more about the…
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Notable Los Angeles: 11/16–11/22
Monday 11/16: PEN Center USA presents the 25th Annual Literary Awards Festival! Cocktail reception at 6 p.m., Awards Dinner and Program at 7:30 p.m. at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Tickets available HERE, and support the amazing work that PEN Center USA…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks criticizes parental hypocrisy in “Colorful Language.” Meanwhile, in the Saturday Review, Joe Sacksteder offers a detailed portrait of the film 99 Homes, by director Ramin Bahrani. The 2008 mortgage crisis serves as the backdrop of a fraught storyline that…
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Defining America through Marriage
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways public rhetoric and legal proceedings reshaped marriage into a new…
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Poems That Kill
And after that, it can go into a book. Which is a great place for poetry to die, you know? Jay Deshpande sat down with Montana Ray to discuss her book, (guns & butter), a collection of poems shaped like…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
The (mostly inadequate) vocabulary of smells. Hey look it’s a lost ancient island! Any day with new dinosaur news is a good day. Bagpiping in the danger zone. Let’s all watch part of the old bay bridge implode.
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The Rumpus Interview with Marian Thurm
Prolific author Marian Thurm talks about her new collection of stories, Today is Not Your Day, being a true New Yorker, and the importance of sympathetic characters.
