Blogs
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The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.
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The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
The Rumpus Book Club chats with George Saunders about Tenth of December, sudden celebrity, why escalation matters if you’re a writer, and how to stick with a story
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: My Kingdom for a Bag of Bones
Up most all of last night with some kind of malady contaminated by insomnia, my mind began to drift as a means to stem the anguish. What follows, fair warning, has little symmetry or reason and more, it seems now…
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Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in…
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Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese proverb which marks the second of the book’s four sections:…
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Nick Cave Monday #21: “Nature Boy”
We’re stuck in a world where bad shit happens all the time. Nick Cave, our Nature Boy, watches the news with his dad and sees “ordinary slaughter” and “routine atrocity.” Dad tells Nature Boy not to look away, be strong…
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Lit-Link Line-up
Jennifer Egan says that Goon Squad could have been better and talks about the danger of applause, in an excerpt from Why We Write, and anthology featuring some of the most acclaimed writers of our time, including Rumpus regular Rick…
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Links I Like
I’ve been thinking about joy, I’ve been thinking about pain. It’s true that I’ve been thinking about joy for some time. Six years to be exact. The year of my nervous breakdown, I read Bettina Aptheker’s Intimate Politics which led…
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Notable Los Angeles 2/2-2/8
Saturday 2/2: The Rattling Wall is on a book tour and makes another stop. Benj Hewitt, Rhoda Huffey, Mandy Kahn, Amelia Morris, and Rachel Reynolds read and sign books. There will be drinks! Free. 7 p.m. at Skylight Books. Rumpus…
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Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
Because a book of poetry can do anything, I am going to propose that Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad open a hole in the Mississippi River. An impossible hole. Because the poems are going to vacate and fill in the space…
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Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumly
Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with…
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The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
[I]f ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one.