Features & Reviews
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Robot Horses Waging War on Angels: A Profile of Chris Eaton
There are bodies, and there are words. The bodies shift sides and see their components replaced; they look in mirrors and see themselves made horrific, the mechanical overtaking the organic, and they ask themselves whether they can still feel, still…
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Freedom Fighters
A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.
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The Last Book I Loved: C. Max Magee, Paper Trails
A collection of newspaper columns might sound like pretty dull fare, especially 30-year-old columns. But Pete Dexter’s punchy, combustible, wry, and sometimes goofy pieces are irresistible. Paper Trails, released in hardcover in 2007 (but never released in paperback and now…
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The Rumpus Original Combo with Danzy Senna
We are all students of memory. Each of us has our own truth to tell.
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Joseph Cervelin: The Last Book I Loved, The Informers
Brett Easton Ellis offers social observations, morbid humor, and compounding degrees of separation and decadence. If his story cycle The Informers were a Choose Your Own Adventure book, here are some outcomes: – You take your disenfranchised son to Hawaii,…
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Tess Bryant: The Last Book I Loved, The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea has, despite my initial wariness about reading the journal of a lonely bitter man, worked its way into being the last book I loved. This story of the arrogant and sexist Charles Arrowby…
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Stephen Burt On Enjoying New Poetry
Over the weekend, I finally got around to unboxing and shelving my archived litmags in the new apartment. As I placed my issues of the Believer back into magazine files in proper order, the top headline on the cover of the…
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An Excerpt From Zeitoun
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business.
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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…