Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus books reviews a novel, a collection of prose poems, and a debut collection of short stories set in Louisiana.
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Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
I’m hoping to God that it’s just temporary, but for whatever reason, the book blogs are suddenly all worried about ethics, whether it’s what to do about reading writers with objectionable opinions or whether writers should base characters on people…
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Help Make a Story
“Any bird departing the yard in a north-north-westerly direction could by chance alight on the window-ledge of room 62A of the Florencio Motel, where a recently arrived woman is living out of a suitcase and several single-serving cereal boxes.” A…
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On the Couch
The protagonist of this novel about addiction, therapy, and recovery, confronts many of the same issues as its author.
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Magic Gardens
“I’m a stripper, rocker, bartender, and writer. I had a lot of plans last year, but none of them involved breast cancer. The disease sidetracked my livelihood, threatened my life, and forced me to reinvent my chest. So far, I’ve…
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Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And With Hypochondria.
I told myself she reminded me of Liz Phair, but without the marijuana-steeped tomboy, devil-may-care, laid-back attitude of Liz Phair. This is the type of thing you tell yourself when you’re young, or at least when I was young. The…
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An Open Letter Concerning The Authors Guild vs. Google, Inc.
The lawyers will get $30 million—does that mean the authors are getting screwed?
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Meet Mario Bellatin
“A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of those literary conferences here where writers are asked to talk about their own favorites. Unwilling to make a choice, he invented a Japanese author named Shiki Nagaoka and…
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We’ve Always Been Postmodern?
“And while postmodern books would, you’d think, have to be published after the modern period — in the 20th or 21st centuries — could postmodernism exist without “Tristram Shandy”? We think not.” At Jacket Copy a while ago, Carolynn Kellog…
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“What does a science fiction writer know about?”
“I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?”…
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The Limits of Narrative
In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out whether a prospective choice “led to the treasure in the…
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A Reaction Sauce
Yesterday we linked to Malcolm Gladwell‘s most recent New Yorker essay, “The Courthouse Ring,” in which Gladwell discusses Atticus Finch, Alabama Governer “Big Jim” Folsom, race, and “the limits of Southern liberalism.” Well over at The Millions Garth Risk Hallberg…