Posts by author
Graham Todd
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Davy Rothbart in The NYT
Recent Rumpus Interviewee, Davy Rothbart, caught up with the NY Times during his current tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of FOUND magazine and his new memoir My Heart is an Idiot. Rothbart has become well known for his role as creator…
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The Art of The Hobbit
It turns out J.R.R. Tolkien also had a knack for doodling. While he wrote The Hobbit, he drew several illustrations, ten of which were included in the first printing of the book. In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the…
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The Death of Anna Kournikova Era: The State of Women’s Sport
Grantland addresses the change in media coverage and marketing of women’s sports today given the success of so many female athletes this summer at the Olympics and beyond. “Kournikova has long since exited the public eye, but those years during…
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How Books Clubs Went Indie
“Forty-something Betsy Birdsall jokes that she likes the Rumpus group because it enables her to hang out in her bathrobe and slippers while pretending she has friends. She says Elliot encouraged her to get active with the club’s discussion group.…
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Happy Roald Dahl Day!
The Guardian has put together a very awesome link round-up of Dahl-inspired activities for the writer’s birthday today, including pictures of Dahl’s childhood and family, the man himself reading the BFG, and a walk through the Roald Dahl Museum via…
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The (Imagined) Woman Reader and Male Anxiety
“The Contemporary Male Novelists fear the Female Reader is no longer willing to interpret rampant misogyny as searing self-portraits of mangled masculinity, but rather as just more misogyny and who needs it? Their livelihoods threatened, the CMNs are doing the…
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Abrams At The Millions
The Millions featured David Abrams in their Post-40 Bloomer column and chronicle the 49-year-olds long road to literary success. Fobbit, Abrams’s first novel, came out from Grove/Atlantic on Sept. 4 and is “is a tale of the Iraq war that manages…
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Exotic Dancing Tax-Exempt Art?
Yesterday, an Albany, NY based strip club argued for exemption from certain state taxes because its dancers are performance artists. The club, Nite Moves, owes the state about $124,000 in a 2006 audit after the club did not pay proper…
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New Photo of Emily Dickinson Discovered
The newly found daguerrotype, taken around 1859, is only the second known photograph of Dickinson and features the poet with her newly widowed friend. The first photo, from 1847, is of the young poet at 16 and has been featured…
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100 Years of Bookmobiles
Here’s an LA Times slideshow of bookmobiles of past and present, starting with Germany’s ultra-mod ROBI bookmobile, which was created to serve the library-less towns in the Heilbronn area. According to Frameweb.com, ROBI is an eco-friendly update to the area’s…
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Putin Flies Away Home
Vladimir Putin guided a flock of Siberian cranes to their winter habitat this week by piloting a motorized hang glider while dressed in a Siberian crane costume. This marks a resurgence of photoshoot worthy exploits by the Russian president after he…
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Brown’s Modernist Journals Project
Greer Mansfield of Bookslut checks out the Modernist Journals Project, a literary site launched in 1995 by Brown University that acts as a digital library of magazines associated with Modernism. The Modernist Journal Project contains a wide variety of oft-written…