Features & Reviews
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How to Save a Neglected Book
A reader writes to Cynthia Crossen at the Wall Street Journal, “Morley Callaghan is my favorite 20th-century novelist. His “That Summer in Paris” is among the best of memoirs. … Every book lover can list authors who were wonderful and…
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Where Have All The Antiheroes Gone?
“But as I’ve been making my own antihero, I’ve come to the disheartening conclusion that he doesn’t appear to have too many contemporaries, that there is little space for the antihero in literature today. Imagine my surprise, not to mention…
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“The memoir of literary obsession”
Over at New York, Sam Anderson has a review of Elizabeth Hawes’ Camus, a Romance in which he identifies the genre “memoir of literary obsession.” I’d never thought of this as a genre, but it’s clearly an important one, most…
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The Worst Library Books Ever
A couple of Michigan librarians have started a web site designed to publicize terrible library books for a) our amusement and b) to bring to light the need for libraries to keep their shelves stacked with current books. The most…
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
And I’m back! Thanks very much to Michael Berger for filling in for me while I was gone! He did a damn fine job. Lots has happened over the last few weeks:
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Welcome to July 5th! Thanks to America, you are now missing limbs, hard of hearing, and hungover. Don’t worry. It’s still a fine day to read book reviews.
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Loitering in the Wrong Places
The book, with its halting, unbeautiful, disjointed lines, proves her awareness of the difficulty of writing poetry about war, trade, immigration, Hurricane Katrina, and George Bush. These are intensely politicized issues, claimed by a blunt, politicized language.
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Journal Highlight: Guernica, The Believer and Cabinet
Guernica talks to Fatima Bhutto, 27-year-old poet and Pakistan’s heir apparent, about the death of her father in one of Pakistan’s famous “encounters,” the two sides of Benazir and why Obama legitimizes the Taliban. In “Dancing About Architecture,” Arthur Philips’s…
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Vertigo in the Stacks
“When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books. I quickly came to know the compulsive vertigo that Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant, prowling the fictionalized Widener stacks,…
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We Need Studs Terkel
At the bookstore I work at, we recently got in a HUGE shipment of remaindered books. Books by Michael Ondaatje, Virginia Woolf, Alain de Botton, all of them brand-new and at bargan-bin prices. Which begs the question, do all books,…
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William T. Vollmann Made Me A San Franciscan
One of the more anticipated summer novels of the season is also probably one of the longest, most disturbing and most intimidating: Imperial, William T. Vollman’s mammoth exploration of the U.S.-Mexican border in Imperial County, CA. Clocking in at about…