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Rumpus Articles
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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…
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BAD MOMMY BLOG: Six Reasons Why The Bad Mommy Will Never Be A Good Socialite
1. Saturday night party/silent auction for a school. Daniel Kim was there, looking around. My husband goes, “Hey, are you lost?” 2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this…
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Let Them Eat Clicks
I have a piece in Friday’s Slate about Amazon.com’s seemingly nonexistent corporate philanthropy — and more importantly, whether that should matter. But I hid the real barb in the tail of the piece:
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I Want More Jesus: Noise Pop from Here to America
Too much revelation at your indie fest? Too much Jesus? Shut up, naysayer. I want more.
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New York Times Word Frequency Visualizations
A Flickr set with visualizations of word frequency. The word “crisis” has surpassed “hope” on only a handful of occasions — one of them is right now. Trends also show a general increase in the mention of superheros over time.…