Features & Reviews
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Notable New York, This Week 1/25 – 1/31
This week in New York Lydia Davis and Richard Howard read, John Wray, Heidi Julavits and Sarah Manguso discuss ebooks at Melville House, Of Montreal and Damon & Naomi perform, Lapham’s Quarterly celebrates the launch of its Religion Issue, artists…
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Alice, 106
At 106 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer is profiled in Haaretz. She is a musician, Holocaust survivor, and is also said to be the last living acquaintance of Kafka.
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The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #3: Sasa Stanisic on the Danube
Sasa Stanisic was born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina and lived there until 1992, at which point his family fled the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. He currently resides in Germany. How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (2008), Stanisic’s first book,…
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Too Much Fun With The OED
It looks like Nick Martens over at The Bygone Bureau is having too much fun with his OED subscription. “To those who would say that there is nothing “secret” about the publicly available Oxford English Dictionary, or that browsing said…
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Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus books published pieces about fucking and writing, A Common Pornography, and Folksy Fruit. Also, there was an interview with Jonathan Lethem.
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Vollmann on Prostitution
“Well, I’m getting older, so I can’t get it up as much as I used to. […] I think prostitutes are amazing people with so much knowledge of human nature and so many fantastic stories. Some of them are scam…
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Oedipus at Hiroshima – Living Design in Japan
Some (more) inspiring Japanese design nuggets excavated from my ramshackle book collection.
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Fucking and Writing: The Rumpus Conversation with Jami Attenberg
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”
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Staying Alive as a Poet, Artist, Etc.
“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.” Jacket Copy last…
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A Bosnian Novelist And An Irish Novelist Walk Into A Bar
If you have any doubts about the power of the novel, or its lasting cultural significance, or its transcendent ability to deepen and enrich our chaotic earthly experiences, look no further than this impassioned conversation at The Believer between two…
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Almond on “Hysterical Lyricism” and the Splinter Generation
“Why do you think people are emailing and texting and twittering and Facebook updating in such a compulsive manner? Because they’re lonely as all hell…” The Splinter Generation has an interview with Rumpus contributor Steve Almond, conducted by Rumpus contributor…
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Remembering Didion’s The White Album
Thirty years have passed since Joan Didion composed The White Album, her book of essays about the unsettling thrills and shadows of 1970’s LA, and by now the book’s title might as well refer to the hair color of its…