Blogs
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The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved: Rose
Inside a used bookstore at a grotesquely outsized strip mall in Fremont, California, I first pulled Li-Young Lee’s 1986 chapbook Rose from the shelf, a volume so thin the spine hardly held a label. Rose was pushed all the way…
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Ederynn Khushrenada: The Last Book I Loved, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan
There are only two disappointments in Gerald Schwab’s The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan. One is the zong-I’m-blind! DayGlo op art cover. I mean, really. For god’s sake this is a $117 book, and Herschel Grynszpan…
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The Last Book I Loved: Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure
I am shitting my pants. Totally. Completely. And … well, figuratively. One night before my travel partner and I are scheduled to fly to Mumbai, she ditches me for Berlin. The city, not the band. So I am alone in Ethiopia,…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Great Gatsby
I was eight years old the first time I heard of The Great Gatsby. My mom took my two teenage sisters to see the movie as soon as it was released. I was jealous my sisters got to go and…
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Throwing Poetry at People: Rumpus Book Club Roundup
Tayari Jones, author of the Rumpus Book Club’s May pick Silver Sparrow gets love from The Village Voice: “Jones… is fast defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester.” Read an excerpt of the book on Scribd. HTML Giant…
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Carolyn Lang: The Last Book I Loved, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
The last book that I loved was You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers, which is about two friends, Will and Hand, who come into $32,000 around the same time one of their friends dies unexpectedly. They are devastated…
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #72: The Future Has an Ancient Heart
Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far, guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.
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Mary Mann: The Last Book I Loved, History on a Personal Note: Stories
Two years ago, I ended a five-year relationship with a man who loved me. Very simply, it wasn’t enough anymore. Responses ranged from distraught to disappointment to disgust. My aunt cried, and my friend D said it was the most…
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Erin Dorsey: The Last Book I Loved, Wuthering Heights
I picked up this classic as one of my “Top Books to Read Before I Die.” One thing this list is teaching me is that you should banish all preconceived notions of what a book is going to be about…
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Why I Chose Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Tracy Smith’s LIFE ON MARS is a strong, surprising, and often beautiful book.
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Ashley Bethard: The Last Book I Loved, Goldengrove
Sometimes you revisit a book you love, like Francine Prose’s Goldengrove. Once you finish reading this book for the third time, you start thinking about your near-hero worship of Prose and her, well, prose. You think about what a well-developed…
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Emily Keeler: The Last Book I Loved, Ghosts
César Aira’s Ghosts: Meaning-saturated, beautiful and complicated. A heat soaked hallucination, this short novel moved through the minutes of the last day of the year in a building so new that it was still under construction.