Features & Reviews
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Somalian Refugee Writers Show the Way
Dadaab is not an oasis. There is no water. In July, food rations are expected to be cut back to 1000 calories a day. The camps are short 38,000 latrines. Every year only twenty students from the entire camp escape…
-
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Five short stories modeled on the works of the old masters make up this smart, witty first collection
-
The Dead Sea Scrolls of John Dillinger
The tale of a long-lost account of one of America’s most notorious criminals, a struggling ad man, and the contributing editor at Playboy who brought the story to light.
-
Caleb Crain Elaborates
Surely you remember our note about Caleb Crain’s new book, The Wreck of the Henry Clay? (He noticed us!) If you don’t remember the story, then briefly: it’s a collection of untimely essays from his blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, edited…
-
“Reading That’s Bad for You,” or: Lessons in Publishing
Ron Charles of the Washington Post reports on Electric Literature, a new bi-monthly magazine that is making lit. mags differently. I’ve noted five lessons about publishing via Electric Literature’s watershed model: “Amid all the dismal reports about the death of…