Columns
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“Become This Year’s Grinch”
It’s way too early for Christmas, but here’s “The Meanest Christmas Gift You Can Give Your Writer Friends.” It’s cool though, you can redeem yourself by giving them this essay by Steve Almond immediately after.
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Who’s There
In Knock Knock, Hartley has accomplished a humor hat-trick, netting jokes a) in poetry, b) while evoking multiple cultures and c) in multiple languages. Hartley’s comedy is in the absurdity of the details, whether sensory or linguistic.
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The Weekly Book Club Round-Up
-Maybe you are tired of looking at a computer screen. Maybe you’re just not a visual person. Maybe you want a new lens into Richard Yates, by Tao Lin. Whatever your needs, Largehearted Boy has just the right medicine: a…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
have a great weekend dudes. The NY Times on tiny Golden Gate Bridges and superheroes in court. Dilating French museums are pretty dang sweet. Flavorwire on the last of Britain’s cinema busses. Soccer physics! When Errol Morris and Werner Herzog…
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Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #20: Ascension
(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995… but this is the end of the line) With an introduction by Matthew Zapruder **
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Elitist White People Trying To Make Themselves Feel Better
(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains…
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Books For The Dark Night Of The Soul
In his late thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a series of emotional and mental breakdowns, many of which he wrote about in a series of random essays and observations collected under the title, The Crack-Up. At the beginning of the…
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Hitchens On Dying
“At a luncheon earlier in the day with Hitchens and Berlinski, Taunton asked Hitchens about his health problems. ‘Well, I’m dying, since you asked,’ Hitchens replied. ‘So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund…
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #51: No Mystery About Sperm
Not a single one of us knows what the future holds.
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Freedom Infograph
A very cool chart: “Voice and Reader Gratification in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom” by Paul Barrett. Disclaimer: Coolness levels may vary depending on whether you’ve read/are reading the book or not. (via @EmperorFranzen and Rumpus Book Club member Peter Knox)