Posts by author
Seth Fischer
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are full of answers. Listen to them. Vonnegut knew why we are all such drama queens (there are charts involved). A thought-provoking take on writing a satisfying ending. The Book Bench points out that CNN…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus books reviewed a collection of poetry by Michael Robins, a novel by Ru Freeman, a book of essays by Kurt Caswell, and the novel Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer.
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Attention Spans are Not the Problem
A few weeks ago, I argued that the Internet age was uniquely well suited to selling short story collections. A few commenters did not agree with what seemed to be implicit in my argument: the idea that the “short attention…
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Tom Wolfe Takes on the Rich
“‘Tarantulas’ was the term the late-19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—steady … steady … some of us rich people went to college, too—used for those who are consumed by resentment. Unable themselves to be great men, they burn with a feverish fervor,…
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The Great Beast’s Landlady
Rodney Davis has a very entertaining essay up about talking to Aleister Crowley‘s landlady Kathleen “Johnny” Simonds. Apparently, Crowley lived with Simonds shortly before his death, and despite his reputation as “The Wickedest Man Alive,” he was a very solid…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs have been talking about the future of reading and literature, which leads me to believe that they don’t think it’s dead. I don’t believe them. The sad truth is that they’re taking Reading Rainbow away…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s the end of August. While most of the world is on vacation, Rumpus Books is publishing book reviews.
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Honest People Just Can’t Help It
Good news! Honesty, it turns out, may not be something that we can control. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton tried to determine whether honesty was a…
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J.M. Coetzee Reviews Poetry Anthology … in Math Journal
“Just as there are poets who will wrestle for months to get an insight down on paper in its most jewel-like form, because to them the truth of the poem is inseparable from its expression, so there are mathematicians who…
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Poet and Drunken Boat Editor Meets NYPD
Ravi Shankar, the founding editor of Drunken Boat, has an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant about a particularly terrible run-in with the NYPD in which he overheard his arresting officer say, “Always a good day when you can bag…