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Rumpus Articles
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Getting The Most Out of Your Social Network
How to get the most out of social networks and not annoy users. (via Mashable) Note, The Rumpus doesn’t do any of this. If you sign up for our Facebook Group, or Twitter feed, or if you’re a friend of…
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A Column About Short Stories—Waterboarding Leonardo Sciascia
I sometimes wonder if the precarious place that short stories hold in the world of publishing (and reading) is because good stories are inherently threatening. They can cause a lot of trouble in a few pages and knock a reader’s…
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Now Be Donna McKechnie
You think writers have it tough. Actors are all outward, public, on display. They don’t have words to hide behind. Every Little Step, a documentary directed by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, is meta-theatre at its best, a…
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Jews on Vinyl
The Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco is celebrating its current exhibit Jews on Vinyl: And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl (at the museum through June 9) with a musical revue “you just didn’t realize…
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Morning Coffee
Morning Coffee, now two hours earlier for our friends on the east coast. Count on it every weekday at 7, Atlantic! Our Rozalia reviews Throw Down Your Heart, the documentary of Bela Fleck’s travels in Africa. Heavypetting. A blog about…
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The World’s Foremost Consultant on the Future of Publishing
A DIRE PREDICTION Changes are coming to the publishing industry. Big changes. It’s not just the Kindle. There’s the iPhone. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. Blortcejil. If your company doesn’t already have a business plan in place for how to deal with…
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Sean Singer: A Poem I Love
Melvin Dixon’s “Spring Cleaning” Melvin Dixon died of AIDS in 1992 and is one of our most underrated poets. “Spring Cleaning” alludes to what Ralph Ellison called “the jagged grain,” the texture of experiencing the blues in one’s life. Dixon,…
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More Than Just a Tussle
Skirmish kneads the world’s dough through peculiarities that maintain the engagement with strangeness and the fortune of language, both as a path to richness and to predicting what will be.
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The Hottest Book in Charing Cross
I’ve long been convinced—see my Village Voice piece from a few years back—that the eventual maturing of in-store Print on Demand technology could spell the end for chain stores in their current form. Chains rely on an insane system of…
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The First Known Dust Jacket
Sunday’s Guardian reports a pretty nifty find at the Bodleian: the first known dust jacket.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #10: The Interactive Playlist
The original idea for this blog was to find my way to things that were unreleased, self-released, and unsigned, and in this installment I’m going to take my mission seriously for a change. Since I’ve been writing these notes, I’ve…