Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Interview with Alasdair Gray
Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry.
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Marilyn Nelson on Fortune’s Bones
Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem is the poet Marilyn Nelson’s rendering of a really horrific true story about a slave owner in Connecticut who dissected the slave Fortune’s bones and “hung them in his house for a little medical school.”…
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Junot Diaz on the Virtues of Being Stubborn
Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer for my favorite book of the last few years The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has written a pretty inspiring tale of frustration and perseverance in O Magazine about the process of writing…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Good morning, world. This week, the blogs are full of fun. Many of them had wondrous posts having to do with lovable, humorous, classic sci-fi authors like Vonnegut and Bradbury and Adams. It was a week made for me. Also,…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s fall! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling, and I can’t seem to leave my house.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Made Flesh” by Craig Arnold
I met the poet Craig Arnold only once. It was late February or early March of this year.
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Ken Krimstein: The Last Book I Loved, The Leopard
Loved? Big word. I’ve liked a lot of books. But loved? And then, what was the last one I loved? I’m not sure I’ve ‘loved’ more than three books in my life, and one of them was the first one…
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Chronic City
Happy day, happy day!! Jonathan Lethem, one of my personal favorites, has a new novel out! It’s called Chronic City, and is, according to Lethem, “the best thing I’ve done.” This is good to hear, as Lethem looks for a…
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Drew Toal: The Last Book I Loved, I am Not Sidney Poitier
My only previous exposure to Percival Everett had been his book American Desert, which I had liked but not loved. So it was with middling expectations that I picked up his last novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier.A day or…
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Erick Lyle’s Secret History Of The City
If you live in San Francisco long enough, you start to wonder: “Where the hell can I go at 3 a.m. which isn’t home or a laundromat or a massage parlor?” This simple question might balloon into a larger, perhaps…
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The Rumpus Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating. “It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed. Secrets of those bearing a Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised; David Foster Wallace…
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The Kakutani Two-Step
“The Kakutani Two-Step. It works roughly like this: belittle a novelist’s finest work to date – preferably by tossing around unsupported adjectives…say, “arbitrary,” “flimsy,” and “unfinished.” Then, five or six years later, when the novelist in question brings forth his…