Features & Reviews
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It Has Ever Been Thus
“Printed books have been in existence for four hundred years at the most, and already they pile up in certain countries in such a way as threaten the old balance of the planet. Civilization has arrived at the most unexpected…
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Lily Burana’s Been Busy
Back in April The Rumpus interviewed Lily Burana. Since then she has been busy promoting her recent memoir I Love A Man In Uniform with a book tour that stopped in several US cities and military installations (although not West…
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VQR Interviews Michelle Orange
The Rumpus’s own Michelle Orange has a contribution in the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s most recent issue. The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into…
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Sullivan
Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus…
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An Author’s Experience of Cover Design
Earlier this month, the subject of book cover design, and who the final design should speak to, blipped across the blogs for a day or so after Seth Godin reasonably opined that the single purpose of a book cover is to…
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Infinite Summer Roundup
I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like to participate and somehow haven’t heard of it yet, there’s…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony’s first novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s Books) is the first recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. It’s about a really short guy who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia and is in love with…
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Novel Tweets
Matt Stewart is hoping to make history this Bastille Day by becoming the first author (“as far as he can tell”) to publish his entire full-length novel via Twitter. The novel, conveniently titled The French Revolution, “is an epic San…
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Why I Write
A 20 page essay on “Why I Write” by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott. Part memoir/part tips and insight. $3 from Scribd, read online or download. (He says he’s going to publish it on The Rumpus at some point, so you…
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Shya Scanlon Experiments with Web Serialization
Beginning this Thursday, Shya Scanlon will be serializing his sci-fi novel, Forecast, in semi-weekly installments across 42 web journals and blogs. Forecast is a sci-fi tale of relationships and identity under constant surveillance. The novel opens in a world where…
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Blogging for Book Deals
What do Look at this Fucking Hipster, Postcards from Yo Momma, Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, have in common (you know, aside being online sensations)? Book deals. Many bloggers, especially…
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The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour…