Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Magic Gardens
“I’m a stripper, rocker, bartender, and writer. I had a lot of plans last year, but none of them involved breast cancer. The disease sidetracked my livelihood, threatened my life, and forced me to reinvent my chest. So far, I’ve…
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Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And With Hypochondria.
I told myself she reminded me of Liz Phair, but without the marijuana-steeped tomboy, devil-may-care, laid-back attitude of Liz Phair. This is the type of thing you tell yourself when you’re young, or at least when I was young. The…
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Morning Coffee
Filling in for Dan this week, I feel almost as though I’ve become him. This man stole identities using Limewire. My method is superior. If anyone wants to try and prove I’m not Dan, feel free to try sequencing my…
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The End of News? Another Beginning
“[The] image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. “In their sweep and scorn, however, [statements like ‘the parasite is killing the host’] seem…
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An Open Letter Concerning The Authors Guild vs. Google, Inc.
The lawyers will get $30 million—does that mean the authors are getting screwed?
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Details on DFW’s Pale King
As you probably already know, David Foster Wallace left an unfinished novel called The Pale King upon his death. Today Tim Martin of the Telegraph UK wrote a remembrance of DFW that, among many other things, includes details of the…
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Meet Mario Bellatin
“A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of those literary conferences here where writers are asked to talk about their own favorites. Unwilling to make a choice, he invented a Japanese author named Shiki Nagaoka and…
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The Lures of a Younger Land
I live in a young country but it seems like we’ve aged like no other place in the world, despite our obscene superabundance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in what we eat and how we eat. And right now…
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We’ve Always Been Postmodern?
“And while postmodern books would, you’d think, have to be published after the modern period — in the 20th or 21st centuries — could postmodernism exist without “Tristram Shandy”? We think not.” At Jacket Copy a while ago, Carolynn Kellog…
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“What does a science fiction writer know about?”
“I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?”…