Features & Reviews
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Tobias Wolff On Short Stories
“(T)he only real people left who write short stories now are people who write literary short stories, if you will. And they are a little more demanding than the average novel; they don’t tend to have neat tied-up endings, which…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Good morning! I’m up against a pretty nasty deadline, so blogging might be a bit light today. In the meantime, here’s some links for you from the book blogs. What is the state of reading among the armed forces in…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books reviewed a novel by Stephen Fink, a collection of short stories by Bonnie Joe Campbell, and a book of nonfiction by Ethan Brown.
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The Last Book I Loved: Outer Dark
Outer Dark left me out of breath; a literary asthma attack propelled by a respiratory one.
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On Creating The Adderall Diaries
Updated, November 20 Just added, class in Missoula Montana, November 29, 4pm. Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott is in the middle/end of an insane book tour promoting his new book, The Adderall Diaries (out two months but recently reviewed in…
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Jonathan Ames Wears Many Hats
Jonathan Ames wears many hats: writer, boxer, performer, raconteur, and screenwriter. The hat he wears in his video interview on bigthink.com is a jaunty chapeau; a beanie perched atop Ames’ bearded head. It’s almost jaunty enough to distract from the…
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Colum McCann
“Every novel is a failure. You can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. That thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you are back at the writing table.” –From “The Rumpus Interview…
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The February House: Something To Aspire To
I’ve recently been in awe of the short stories of Paul Bowles, the American ex-pat novelist, composer, and translator who lived in Morocco and wrote The Sheltering Sky and who was basically Beat before the Beats. Besides maybe Flannery O’Connor…
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Studs Terkel And The FBI
“In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy — maybe if he’d gotten the job, we would have had “CSI: Studs Terkel.” But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that…
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Chomsky At Guernica
“The people we call intellectuals aren’t necessarily smarter or more knowledgeable than anyone else. But they happen to have a lot of privilege, and privilege confers responsibility. And so they oughta do things. I don’t expect them to.” At Guernica…
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A Future Always Pure and Perfect and Remote
Jon Stephen Fink’s novel A Storm in the Blood imagines the lives of Jews, anti-Tsarists, and revolutionaries in London’s East End.