Posts by author
Daniel Gumbiner
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The Rumpus Interview with Scott McClanahan
McClanahan’s prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Miller
Mary Miller is the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Less Shiny, and her debut short story collection, Big World, was published by Hobart in 2009.
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Sentence and Solas
If you didn’t see it this weekend, Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, wrote an astonishingly incisive op-ed about the myriad ways in which literature is a product of translation. Cunningham suggests, borrowing, ostensibly, from T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and…
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Close Reading
Jonah Lehrer has an article in Wired on the ways by which e-text might affect our reading processes. Lehrer begins by briefly summarizing the “neural anatomy” of how we read: we have a “ventral route,” which, for a literate person…
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Happy (Early) Birthday Ray Bradbury!
UCLA has a number of videos up to celebrate Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday, which is this Sunday. In one of the videos Bradbury explains, unequivocally, how he made it to 90: “You have to love life completely. I have been…
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Growing Up American
The Guardian’s Book Blog lauds the American coming-of-age novel and asks why the British don’t possess the same bildungsromanic aptitude. Judy Blundell, Jandy Nelson and Simon Rich are cited as contemporary examples of our natural proclivity for the genre. Interestingly,…
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“To Have a Second Lanuage is to Have a Second Soul”
How much does language shape our thinking capabilities? Does it exist only as a tool to reproduce/translate thought or does it take an active role the production of thought? Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford, examines the dialectic…
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Absolutely Specific
This Recording has a feature on the interviews between Mel Gussaw and Harold Pinter. Certain excerpts are absurdly quotable. For example, “MG: Do you feel that you have to guard against emotion? HP: I don’t quite understand you.” There are…
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New York Alki
Rumpus contributor Ryan Boudinot, author of The Littlest Hitler, talks with I09’s Charlie Jane Anders about his forthcoming novel, Blueprints for the Afterlife. The novel takes place in a full-scale replica of Manhattan in Puget Sound (cue Synecdoche, NY comparison). …
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On the Road Meets Strunk and White
The Great Typo Hunt chronicles the journey of two conscientious vandals, Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Hurston, as they attempt to reform our nation’s signage. Listen to the story at Talk of the Nation.
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Love and Serfdom
Check out Deborah Soloman’s terrific, ultra-quippy interview with the author of Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart. Shetyngart touches on the death of silence, Russia’s antiquated notions of espionage and the state of American fiction. Also, if you haven’t already, read Shteyngart’s phenomenal personal…
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In Defense of Shirley Jackson
Salon’s Laura Miller attempts to contextualize the work of Shirley Jackson (her “parton saint of oddballs”) within the American canon. Jackson, most famous for her story “The Lottery” (which you probably read in high school), was, Miller suggests, too “gothic”…