Posts by author
Sam Riley
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FUNNY WOMEN #121: I Sold My Software Company and Now I’m into Art
Building a really successful, incredibly efficient metadata-driven software company that changes the way we think and feel about metadata and making art are not that different.
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Fall’s Rumpus Book Club Selections
The Rumpus Book Club is proudly presenting Zipper Mouth, Laurie Weeks’s debut novel as our October pick. Published by the Feminist Press, it tells the story of a New York junkie, along with the “exalted night-club epiphanies” and “devastating morning-after…
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Modeling Literary Culture
Should book reviews be reserved for the literary elite? Isn’t it important for a book to win the respect of the general public? These are the questions that distinguish book reviews from blog reviews, which is essential in our forging…
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Cities and You
The Atlantic recently ran an article entitled “Why Americans Love Chain Stores: A Psychological Perspective,” and not only does it break down our metropolitan American tendencies, but it explains them in terms of our psychological issues. Our ideals about American…
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Defending Women Writers
Roxane Gay’s on HTML Giant talking about the covers of chick-lit novels and the stigma attached to their formulaic visual coding, though the feminization of book covers is taking over more than just the chick-lit genre. It’s unfortunate that women…
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“How to Write a Love Poem”
“Poetry occupies a cultural space in Contemporary American Society somewhere between Tap Dancing and Ventriloquism.” How do you claim some of this space as your very own? The Awl has a handy guide on how to construct a love poem,…
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Listen to This!
In 1958 Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler discussed each other’s writing in this BBC interview. Being seasoned wordsmiths on the subject, they discuss what makes a British thriller versus an American thriller (apparently “thriller” is an elusive term), heroes and…
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Modern Gag Cartoons, A History
Max Eastman was elected to be the editor of the Masses, the magazine that birthed the modern gag cartoon, fittingly described as such: “…the magazine leaned away from the conventions of the establishment and toward the eccentricities of bohemians everywhere.…
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Nabokov v. Wilson
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson academically quarrel in a series of letters, written to assuage the pain of illness that was afflicting them both. They’ve got a shared “literary curiosity,” but the specifics of their understanding of Western literature reveal…
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On Portraying Sexual Violence
The Millions has an essay on sexual violence and its literary and cinematic representations. Is it better to represent sexual violence through a code of silence, through allusions and subtlety or explicitly? Books and films that portray sexual violence diverge…
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Broke As Hell East Coast Book Tour
Broke-Ass Stuart’s on an East Coast book tour, proselytizing the spendthrift lifestyle in select cities. He will be speaking and providing signatures for his book Young, Broke, and Beautiful: Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply. And there will be DJs…
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An Interview with The Wire‘s Omar
Michael Kenneth Williams, the actor who played Omar on the highly-praised HBO series The Wire, is interviewed on Mother Jones. The show is often described as “the greatest television show ever made,” and Williams offers his perspective on why the…