Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The Camera’s Eye
For a filmmaker, the loss of an eye can be…well, an opportunity. At least that’s how this guy sees it, with his one working eye. As for the other, he’s having it replaced with a prosthetic, in which will be housed…
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Pimp This Bum
As Amazon, eBay, and the 2008 Presidential election demonstrated, the Internet is a great revenue stream. Well, two guys out of Houston (Sean and Kevin Dolan) decided to harness its power for the benefit of the homeless – at least…
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Robert Mailer Anderson:The Last Book I Loved, 2666
The last book I loved was Roberto Bolano’s 2666. His powers as a narrator are staggering. His abilities to both deconstruct the novel, while also somehow meeting the brutality and humor of his subject and characters head on is amazing…
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Life in the Woods
Peter Rock’s darkly evocative fifth novel follows a father and daughter’s underground existence in a city park.
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Jason Roberts: The Last Book I Loved, Soon I Will Be Invincible
I happen to agree that Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie) deserves its slot in the canon as one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. But Soon I Will Be Invincible uses language alone to take…
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The Day the Clown Cried
If Jerry Lewis’s recent Special Academy Award for his humanitarian work piqued your interest in his creative work, you’ll be interested to learn of one of cinema’s great lost gems: The Day the Clown Cried. Jerry Lewis has supposedly kept…
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Flannery on the Couch
In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
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The Art of Lost Words Exhibit
What makes a word fall out of use? The Text Gallery in London is currently exhibiting The Art of Lost Words, “an exhibition of design, typography and illustration inspired by forgotten words. 47 participants have chosen from among the dictionary’s…
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Cobblers and Coverless Books
Doing well: shoe repair shops and, according to the Telegraph of London, used bookstores:
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Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to…
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The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of…
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The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it to bed at night—slip it under your pillow or shove…