Features & Reviews
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The Internet Is Making Me Illiterate
There’s been a lot of talk lately on the book blogs about what the Internet is doing to our ability to read, and not surprisingly, no one wants to speak for everyone and sound like a luddite and say the…
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Maud Newton on Eve
“God excoriated Eve more roundly and punished her more severely than He did Adam not because she was more wicked, but because she represented an actual threat. Seeking knowledge, she chose to eat the fruit, whereas Adam ate passively and only because…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
At HTMLGIANT, brilliant craft advice from a cartoon! “If you’re not popular, and you write a good poem, nobody gives a shit.” The Guardian goes off on Martin Amis, complaining of “the continued endurance of a surprising tolerance for misogyny from…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s a Sunday, and it’s the day after Halloween. What makes for a better hangover than reading an excellent bunch of book reviews?
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John Wraith’s Penis
“John Wraith’s penis is a neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, and is central to every plot twist in the book.” Max Ross reviews Alistair Morgan’s Sleeper’s Wake.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Feverhead
I’m a promiscuous lover of books. I treat each one as if it’s the only—there will never be another after, there were none before. This is the last book I read and the last book I loved.
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Jonathan Lethem and [insert marijuana pun here]
Jonathan Lethem talks to the LA Times Book Jacket about his new novel Chronic City in an interview by Carolyn Kellogg. The interview covers the character development of Perkus Tooth, the coffee-addled, pot-head dandy and “cultural curator,” whose “stoned paranoiac…
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Willa A. Cmiel: The Last Short Story I Loved, “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea”
I read J.M.G Le Clézio’s “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea” over the course of an average day—during meals, on the subway, during slow periods at work—and was afraid to let it end. When it did, I read…
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Hear That? That’s the Sound of Someone Reading to You
I remember all the nights I spent tucked into bed with my other sisters and our mother perched on the end of the bed reading Goodnight Moon to us. Those were the days; now I just stay up late at…
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Fighting the Thousand Year War
Praveen Mavdan and Christin Evans, owners for the past two years of the Booksmith in San Francisco, are writing a series of weekly articles on the Huffington Post about their experiences running the store and, most importantly, their efforts to…
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Reviewing The Reviewers
“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews or criticism that I read online seems not simply to…
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The Beauty Of Black Sparrow Books
The love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things. If I loved to read as much as I loved books, for instance, then I wouldn’t own at least a…