Features & Reviews
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The Wind Has Stopped Blowing (Your Pockets Are Filled With Wind)
It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained.…
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Douglas Rushkoff and Life, Inc.
“For me, the idea of selling out was the worst possible thing,” says Douglas Rushkoff during a discussion with friend and fellow writer Walter Kirn one recent evening at an independent bookstore in SoHo Manhattan.
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China’s Statistics Poetry
“Life Some mock me for doing statistics Some loathe me and statistics Some don’t understand what statistics are Why is it that statistics Put a calm smile on my face? Because of statistics I can solve the deepest mysteries” A…
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“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
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Thomas Pynchon’s Summer Read
Inherent Vice is “a noir-like novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s” that follows “a dope-smoking private detective named Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello.” It is 384 pages long and hits book stores tomorrow. An agency in LA…
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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!