Features & Reviews
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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.
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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.…