Features & Reviews
9297 posts
Mountain Valley, Southwestern Virginia
Josh Weil, author of The New Valley, has an essay in Granta 107 (Summer 2009) entitled “One Ridge Over.” The beautiful piece is about living alone in rural Virginia and…
The Rumpus Interview With Sophia Raday
Sophia Raday’s new book, Love In Condition Yellow–A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage, is a beautifully rendered, often hilarious, account of how opposites can attract, and maybe even should. It’s…
The Age of Orphans
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
Tissue of Flesh and Light
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot…
Walter Benjamin’s Translation Machine
“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like…
Much Ado About Amazon’s Kindle Mishap
We covered the news that Amazon removed books from subscribers’ Kindles last week. There is, however, more to the story.
A Survey of the Stripper Memoir
Early on in her stripper memoir Diablo Cody declares “strippers are the most fascinating, inscrutable animals I’d ever observed.” If the number of stripper memoirs that have appeared in the…
Love Is a Plane Crash of the Soul
Two Latin American novels, published in English for the first time, stake out radically different artistic territory.
How to Make an Oscar Wao
“It was very late, and we were over at a friend’s house… (T)hat night we were just all hanging out and it was a bunch of Mexican bohemians and me…
“Crowdfunding” and “Friendraising” a Shorty Q & A with Deanna Zandt
Deanna Zandt is writing a book. She has a contract with Berrett-Koehler, but the publishing house does not usually “give advances, relying instead on a more author-friendly royalty structure.”
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are scaring the ever-loving Jesus out of me. Sure, there have been a few fun, interesting updates and interviews, but most of what they’ve been…