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Rumpus Articles
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Why we need newspapers: They stand against tyranny
In the 1960s and 70s, Central and South America were rife with dictatorships which used secret police, the military, right-wing death squads and tight control of the media to quash dissent and keep power. One of the most egregious of…
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The New Valley by Josh Weil
Josh Weil’s keenly observed trio of novellas follows the lives of men left behind by time’s relentless progress.
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Tye Pemberton: The Last Book I loved, Remainder
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was a bit of a darkhorse darling when it first arrived on the scene, enjoying attention from everyone and their mother, the latter of whom rightly celebrated it and nearly exhausted it, marking it as possibly “one…
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Images of Bukowski We Didn’t Use
Not because they weren’t good, but because Ian Huebert offered to do original art for the essay by Charles Bukowski.
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Zak Smith in Conversation with Sean McCarthy
Zak Smith: There’s a lot of “stoner” art being made these days–like some half-assed faux-naive drawing of a yeti riding a bicycle into a bee’s butt or something. Your work isn’t like that–yet it does seem to have something to…
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Sunday Iran News Links
The Iranian government arrests over 100 opposition leaders. It looks like this might get really, really violent. Talking Points Memo has a photo gallery of what’s happening. After all other forms of communication are cut, there are reports of Twitter-organized rooftop…
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Being a Woman Before Feminism
Bookslut came across this hilarious and somewhat brilliant essay by Lynn Barber from last December in which she talks about what it was like to come of age before feminism: “We had no sex education. We had a lesson on reproduction in…
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In Israel, Literary Authors Report the News
Last Wednesday, in honor of Hebrew Book Week, the Israeli daily Haaretz sent its journalists home one day and brought in a bunch of literary authors to report the news. Apparently, it worked brilliantly. The weather report was a poem about summer.…
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Punk Rock Explained
I have an admission to make. I’m one of those people who changes the subject whenever punk rock comes up. Don’t get me wrong. I like the music. But I refuse to memorize the name of the Sex Pistols’ first bassist,…
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Is Your Novel Autobiographical?
Academics spend their careers studying how autobiographical novels are. Readers spend hours obsessing over it. But in a brief interview with The New Yorker’s Book Bench, Aleksandar Hemon may have answered the age old question about whether his novel is…