Features & Reviews
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A Candy Box of History’s Sappiest Literary Lovers
Familiar figures among upper echelon literary lovelorn include Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fannie Osbourne, Gerard de Nerval and Jenny Colon, to name but a few. Their stories have all the poignancy, drama, humor and pathos of…
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The Rumpus Short Interview with Guy Raz: “Three-Minute Fiction”
When Guy Raz officially became the weekend host of NPR’s All Things Considered last summer, two of his goals were to make the show more interactive and to somehow get a professor from Harvard who he really admired involved. He…
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“We Got Lost for a While”
“[The Ticking is the Bomb] pushes readers to acknowledge, if not meditate on, the urges lurking inside us, those we tamp down in order to continue, to resist the impulses (conscious or not) to hurt ourselves, the ones we love,…
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The Rumpus Valentine’s Day Review of Drenched
[T]he universe of Marisa Matarazzo’s first book is soaked through, awash in torrential love and water.
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“Feeling Like I Was Getting Somewhere.”
“My own path into writing songs comes directly through literature. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a capital-A author, and I wrote short stories on an old Royal typewriter all the time. That was how I spent…
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Cars are Always Funny and So are Landlords and Sex
“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no…
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San Francisco’s Demographic Shift
“San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore might have to close, the victim of a mix of…
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You Mean Writing Can’t Be My Career?!
“What the profiles fail to reveal is that the literary apprenticeship is a lengthy one for the majority, that getting published at all is difficult, and to get paid enough to not do anything else but write is virtually a…
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Things Not To Do In Your Debut Novel
“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs to be driven by something very deep: What is essential…
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Kierkegaard Available in English
“In a just world, translators would be paid ten times as much as authors. Their work cannot be other than tedious, their names are soon forgotten, yet one has only to try to imagine what our cultural life would be…
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Old Man Winter Comes to Town
In attempt to cheer myself up about my city’s neverending thundersnow, I present here Beatrice Braun-Fock’s whimsical illustrations for Old Man Winter Comes to Town by Hilde Hoffmann. The German edition was published in 1959. I have a 1960 American…
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The Cost of Digital Lit
First there was the bitter move by Amazon to remove all Macmillan titles from its digital inventory after Macmillan demanded higher e-book pricing. Then two more publishing houses publicly denounced Amazon’s dime a dozen approach to pricing e-books at $9.99.…