Features & Reviews
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Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the husbands they marry or communities they join and sent back…
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The Last Book I Loved: Walking Dead Comics
I’ll tell you something that’s total crack, is the Walking Dead Comics. I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately, and that one is amazing. Also, there’s a guy named Ed Brubaker who is the most underrated writer I know…
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Rumpus Radio
The Lonely Voice has a podcast: tune-in to hear Rumpus contributor Peter Orner read and discuss the opening of John Edgar Wideman’s story “Welcome.” For more of Orner’s thoughts on Wideman, click here.
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White-Washed Cover Against Writer’s Wishes
Justine Larbalestier’s thriller Liar is told from the perspective of shifty Micah, an unreliable teen who describes herself as an African-American with short nappy hair. It’s no wonder that the public and even Larbalestier herself were shocked when Bloomsbury’s USA…
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Is Michael Chabon Giving Grownups Too Much Credit?
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon laments the loss of a sense of adventure in childhood. “If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children,” he said, “What will become of…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are obsessed. They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both authors and look forward to reading both books, but this…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s been one hell of a week for Rumpus books, complete with a review by D.A. Powell of Rachel Loden’s Dick of the Dead and an interview with Jonathan Ames. Come read!
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“Amazon.com is watching you.”
Amazon, we’re still mad at you. Last week, the company once again stirred waves of customer indignation when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindles. The Rumpus covered the story here and here.
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Why We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th…
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Roald Dahl, Man of Letters
I have read Kafka’s letters and Flaubert’s letters and Jane Austen’s letters. These authors are a part of my “adult” life. But I haven’t read the letters of authors who made the distinction between childhood and adulthood. There is a…
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Nicholson Baker Tries Kindle, Finds it Wanting
If you know anything about Nicholson Baker, you know that he has an unparalleled talent for describing the small and ordinary things in everyday life, their textures and surfaces and the way they heft in the hand; and more than…
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Fingers Through Holy Water
Gospel music, like its secular cousin the blues, never wallows in pity, but instead seeks to transcend pain and reach glory. Bashir’s book makes the same trip.