Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Rebecca Steinitz: The Last Book I Loved, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
The last book I loved was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. I hadn’t loved a book in a while, but I thought I might love this one because it is a Persephone book, and I also quite…
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Beacon Press to Republish Out-of-print MLK Books
Beacon Press has come to an agreement with the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to republish four out-of-print books by the clergyman and civil rights leader, including “Strength to Love,” a collection of his most eloquent and inspiring…
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Like a Boss
I don’t usually highlight videos with over 10 million views on YouTube, but “swallow sadness, send some faxes” may be my favorite rhyme since Biggie’s “escargot, my car go…”
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Default Settings
After two years of near-flawless performance, my install of (gasp!) Windows Vista suddenly stopped working in myriad annoying ways, and so I spent this morning first restoring my system to factory settings and reinstalling all my stuff, and then restoring…
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A Badass Biker Poet: Thom Gunn
Gunn’s work is imminently teachable in the form of Selected Poems, but it is derived from a world that now no longer exists: the Metaphysical poets drawn through the intermingling bodies of the Summer of Love: biker leather, drug haze,…
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Bruno: Activist or Stereotype?
Bruno, the flamboyantly gay Austrain fashion reporter played by Sacha Baron Cohen, has a feature length film. Due to many wild premiers – from bull-fighting in Madrid to dressing as a Buckingham Palace guard in London – and a unique…
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Novelist disappears into illness, addiction
Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious”…
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The Window of Possessive Titles
One of the new window displays at Red Hill. My first contribution: the window of Possessive titles, a trend I can’t stop ranting about. Especially with novels. But still, an admirable array of authors employ this sure-fire titling method. I,…
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Morning Coffee
Scienceray on spectacular dams: mankind’s way of saying “take that, nature. Of course then you’ve got shipwrecks, nature’s way of giving it right back to us. Japanese street art: sticker hunting in Shibuya. Dan Harms gives a lecture on the…
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Iran Links
“With the Marchers: A resident reports from the streets and the rooftops.” The BBC interviews Caspian Makan, the fiance of Neda Agha-Soltan whose murder at the hands of the Basij was witnessed by the world on YouTube (warning: this video…