Features & Reviews
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California Dreaming
If you haven’t yet watched Showtime’s hit series Californication, here’s a quick tagline: Down-and-out novelist Hank Moody – played by David Duchovny – tries to get his life back on track after his partner/muse leaves him and he succumbs to…
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On The Forgotten Magic Of Writing
“I’m so, so tired of reading about how writing should be demystified, how it doesn’t work the way Cortazar describes at all, how you toil at it slowly like you’re scrubbing a toilet, how the important parts are rewriting everything…
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A Gate at the Huh?
Despite this novel’s serious flaws, it is a gratifying experience. You don’t so much read Lorrie Moore’s books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you.
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Big Machine: The New Novel I’m Most Excited About Reading
Every Tuesday the new books arrive at my store. I get to slice open the boxes, pull out the books, price them and arrange them in the most appealing and eye-catching way possible. Because I don’t personally order them, it’s…
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So Who Won the Nobel Prize, Again?
As you’ve heard by now, the Nobel Prize in Literature this year went to one Herta Müller, and even if you’re an avid reader and fancy yourself some kind of intellectual, you probably haven’t heard of her until this morning.…
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A New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
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The Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!
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The Last Book I Loved: I Remember
When I read a few dozen I Remembers in Joe Brainard’s I Remember, my brain starts mining itself without me telling it to. The canonical memories come first, but these set my brain on course to dustier ones it usually…
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Things to Think About: Publishing Links
Amended Google Book Settlement slated for November 9th. Wahida Clark on writing in prison versus writing in the free world. (via The Book Bench) The Nobel Prize in Literature will be revealed Oct. 8. Harvard buys John Updike (class of…
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The Last Book I Loved: 8: All True: Unbelievable
I would not say to everyone, “You must read Amy Fusselman’s 8“, and I would not say, “You will love it!” I would however say to most anyone, “You will love The Pharmacist’s Mate,” which is the first book Amy…
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Bolaño’s Translator in San Francisco Tomorrow Night
Today the Center for the Art of Translation held one of two events in San Francisco featuring Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666. At today’s event, Wimmer made some fascinating introductory remarks about translating Bolaño (of…
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Ordinary Injustice By Amy Bach
“‘Ordinary injustice results,’ Bach writes, ‘when a community of legal professionals becomes so accustomed to a pattern of lapses that they can no longer see their role in them.’ She cites the well-known case of the sleeping lawyer: Joe Frank…