Features & Reviews
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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 that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome…
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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.
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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 past few years are anything to go by, publishers agree.…
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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.
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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 and my Guatemalan buddy. And one of these Mexican cats…
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“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.”
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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 saying makes me want to build a series of tunnels…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books has published a review of a memoir and three novels, as well as two interviews, one of which includes an excerpt from Robert Sullivan’s book The Thoreau You Don’t Know.
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Irish Writers Online
When my wife and I signed the lease on our new place, we fell into a discussion with our new landlord about writing and writers; not surprisingly, he’d come to the Rumpus to check out my work, and ended up…
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Words on Paper Aren’t Going Anywhere
“The mission for book publishers and print media at large should be to create a product that is irreplaceable and indispensable.” Eric Obenauf, the publisher of Two-Dollar Radio, doesn’t think that print is dying. Changing? Certainly. But disappearing? No:
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Jonathan Ames Talks Sex, Frivolity, and Egocentrism
Rumpus contributor Jonathan Ames recently got interviewed by a little magazine called Time. Clearly this upstart Time rag is hopping on the Rumpus’ pro-Ames bandwagon, but we won’t begrudge them. How can you NOT want to learn more about a…
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Life Is Beautiful
Vicki Forman’s Bakeless Prize-winning memoir recounts the premature births, and deaths, of her children.