Features & Reviews
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Where Celebrities Go to Die
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes a crack at the underworld in a hit-and-miss new novel.
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The Adderall Diaries
The Adderall Diaries by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott got a rave review in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. More on the official Adderall Diaries Page.
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Google’s Book Search: Not Good for Academia?
We’ve covered the Google book settlement quite a lot recently. While we tend to focus on how the case affects authors, Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, is looking past the settlement and examining what…
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Raymond Carver: Vicarious Slumming for the WSJ
It’s Raymond Carver night at the Rumpus! Moments after I wrote and scheduled the preceding post, I saw this tweet from the Library of America: “WSJ on Raymond Carver: ‘There must be few story collections whose notes offer more melodrama…
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David Ulin on the LOA’s Raymond Carver
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is stunningly desolate, a group of stories so laconic they almost perfectly reflect the resignation of characters struggling with alcoholism, infidelity and the desperation of diminished dreams… “Despite the book’s success,…
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Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
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The Evolution of On the Origin of Species
Science is fluid. Like everything else it progresses and evolves. Even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species transformed over the course of several editions. For example, “the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ — usually considered central to the theory and…
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Nash on Books as a Commodity
“We tend to view history in terms of one age succeeding another, the greater vanquishing the lesser, or the tawdry always winning out over the elevated. “The reality, Striphas demonstrates, is that we’re a populist capitalist democracy, a world where…
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Harvey Pekar Gets Online
Harvey Pekar of American Splendor fame has teamed up with Tara Seibel, Joseph Remnant, Rick Parker, and Sean Pryor to create his first webcomic over at SMITH. The Pekar Project will have new stories every other week, along with “interviews,…
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A Quick Look at the Google Book Search Settlement
US district court judge Denny Chin will be ruling in a case on how we access printed books in the future. Who’s in the middle of a bid for our literary heritage? Google, of course.
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Free Nog
Lit Drift is a new blog dedicated to “the art and craft of fiction in the 21st century.” Along with articles they have short stories, daily creative prompts (I really like this concept), and a weekly free book giveaway. The…
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Sympathy for These Devils
Drug addicts, pimps, whores, misogynists, hoodlums… all the usual suspects inhabit the stories in Irvine Welsh’s new collection.