Features & Reviews
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How to Leave Hialeah
“Crucet is endowed with the double vision that helped Richard Wright and Salman Rushdie describe the lives of marginalized people with poignancy, humor, and rich music.”
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Playing With Words
One thing that fascinates me about writing is how people play with the medium: making up games and assignments to bring us together. For example the Napkin Project at Esquire, where cocktail napkins are mailed to writers and then returned,…
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Jami Attenberg: The Last Book I Loved, Everything Matters!
I was going to write this piece about A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, which is also a very good book, one that I loved, and one I recommend you read. I recently Netflixed “Apocalypse Now,” which for some…
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Poetics and Slaughter
2005 saw the seventieth anniversary of the birth of Danilo Kiš. He died of lung cancer in 1989.
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Stand Proud
“There’s a blurb on the front of the 2008 paperback edition of Elmer Kelton’s novel Stand Proud. It’s from True West magazine, and it reads, ‘One thing is certain: as long as there are writers as skillful as Elmer Kelton,…
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No Jackets
“What makes these books so unusual-looking is that, even though they’re hardcovers, their cover art is not printed on dust jackets but instead stamped directly onto the boards that hug their pages. The result is a handsome, eye-catching look that…
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Gretchen Schrafft: The Last Book I Loved, Stranger Things Happen
Far too many nights of my childhood were spent huddled under the covers, straining to read the pages before me with the weak aid of a flashlight. I punished my vision with stories about ghosts, dragons, and life on other…
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J.M. Coetzee Reviews Poetry Anthology … in Math Journal
“Just as there are poets who will wrestle for months to get an insight down on paper in its most jewel-like form, because to them the truth of the poem is inseparable from its expression, so there are mathematicians who…
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Poet and Drunken Boat Editor Meets NYPD
Ravi Shankar, the founding editor of Drunken Boat, has an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant about a particularly terrible run-in with the NYPD in which he overheard his arresting officer say, “Always a good day when you can bag…
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The Sunday Rumpus Books Supplement
This week, Rumpus books published a review of a story collection by Greg Gerke, an interview with Benjamin Anastas, a Rumpus Reprint by our own Stephen Elliott, and an exclusive excerpt from a best of the Believer compilation.
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs got technology, and it turns out they’re not so sure whether they like it. Below, see them wrestle with television invading their books, the Kindle, and crappy book trailers — also, Virginia Woolf uses one…