Features & Reviews
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New Fiction from Roberto Bolaño
“I was going out with two women. That I do remember clearly. One of them was getting on a bit—she must have been about my age—and the other wasn’t much more than a girl. Some days, though, they seemed like…
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Notable New York, This Week 2/1 – 2/7
This week in New York Unsound, the avant-garde culture festival that began in Eastern Europe, debuts in the city, historian Garry Wills discusses the atomic bomb, a night with filmmaker Ross McElwee at IFC, Jamaica Kincaid and Gary Shteyngart on…
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Writers Remember Salinger
As we mentioned earlier this morning, Dave Eggers, arguably one of the most actively engaged and socially involved writers (almost the living antithesis of Salinger) paid tribute to Salinger for The New Yorker, probing the question of why Salinger retreated…
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Emptying the E-shelves: Amazon Removes Macmillan
Update: Amazon caves to Macmillan’s demands! Read on to learn more about the dispute: After Macmillan Publishers challenged Amazon‘s pricing of e-books for Kindle users, Amazon retaliated on Friday by pulling not only all e-books by Macmillan authors but also…
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A Necessarily Incomplete But Hopefully Helpful List That Proves The Slush Pile Has a Pulse
A couple of weeks ago, I ranted against a Wall Street Journal article that proclaimed “The Slush Pile is Dead.” The slush pile, for those who are unfamiliar, is the name for the large amount of unsolicited writing that’s submitted…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Blog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it. Eggers on Salinger. Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via) “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!”…
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The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books reviewed a comic novel and a book that “straddles the line between fiction and poetry.” We also published a Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Kara Candito.
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Hellish Advertising
Rumpus cartoonist Jon Adams brought this ridiculous cover for Dante’s Inferno to our attention. Not only does the cover image look like it has more to do with a Ridley Scott movie than one of the greatest literary works of…
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Is Borders Broke?
Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders.
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Bolaño: The Last Interview
“M.M.: What do you wish to do before dying? R.B.: Nothing special. Well, clearly I’d prefer not to die. But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she’s neither a lady nor very distinguished, but,…
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Jason Roberts Remembers J. D. Salinger
This is a difficult death to parse, absence compounding absence. The overriding distinction of J.D. Salinger, both as a writer and as a celebrity, has always been his fundamental non-presence. On the page and in life, Salinger’s most memorable role…