Features & Reviews
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How the NYTimes Book Review selects books to review
In a post on the blog Book Publishing News, publicist Scott Lorenz distills a recent speech by New York Times Book Review Editor Barry Gewen and accounts from other sources to form a picture of how the NYTBR — probably…
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When in Rome: DC Lit Mag Launched
The Rome Review, Washington DC’s new literary magazine, released its inaugural issue on June 27. The issue features work from Daniel Wallace, Blake Butler, Kathleen Rooney, and David Means, as well as photography from Jonathan Goley, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books published reviews of a novel, a book of poetry, and a book about Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a survey of the stripper memoir, an interview with Sophia Raday, a remembrance of Frank McCourt, and an…
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A Remembrance of Frank McCourt
“Sit back. I’m going to tell you a story,” Frank said in his brogue, looking into the distance like a Homerian epic-teller. “Don’t you ever dare steal it.”
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Introducing Emily Hahn
“Whenever I think of the Christmas season I spent in the eastern reaches of the Belgian Congo, in 1932, I experience a floating sense of unreality. A number of questions occur to me and are unanswered. For example, where exactly…
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By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
PART I: WHY RUMSFELD, WHY THIS BOOK? Donald Rumsfeld is my grandmother.
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How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program
Give us the reddened stubble in the crease of a debutante’s groin, or the minute trembling of a banker’s underlip.
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Chaos
Sometimes, reading can feel like being on a roller-coaster–one of the classically vertiginous stomach-hurtling superstructures, like Coney Island’s Cyclone, say–but, of course, better. “High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life” by Brian Christian, an essay in the latest…
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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 is available online. Granta also posted a few of Weil’s…
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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 also insightful meditation on America after 9/11 as it struggles…
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The Age of Orphans
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
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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 comprehend the connection.