Rabbit Reduxion – Looking back at Updike
In the wake of losing several authors of extreme significance this last year, David Foster Wallace, Studs Terkel, and now John Updike, a bevy of reflection floods in. Search for…
Features & Reviews
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The Best Music is Made of Subtraction
Like the Jazz, Blues, and R&B music Brown references, these poems are born of heartbreak, explorations of love and violence, connections and disconnections, the vast complications of body and heart.
Malcolm Gladwell and ESPN Banter, Rumpus Gets Smarter
“My goal in life,” says Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Bill Simmons on ESPN, “is to get to the place that I can take the same idea and just…
Daphne Merkin’s literary depression
There is a peculiar quality to “A Journey Through Darkness,” Daphne Merkin’s memoir of chronic depression published this week in the Times Magazine. Her intimate account of lifelong struggle with…
What Is Found
In Patrick Somerville’s novel, an expectant father must decide what kind of man he wants to be.
Google, Kindle, and The Library of Babel
Technological innovation seems almost strangely commonplace these days, from say, contact lenses that could layer data directly onto your view of the world to robots fighting far-flung wars to computer…
The Great American Novel in Miniature
Lurking beneath the dazzling political and pop-culture fireworks of Benjamin Taylor’s second novel, The Book of Getting Even, is a vivid tale of American displacement and discovery that could be…
Maddie Oatman: The Last Book I Loved, Divisadero
Last night I dreamed of apocalypse: the room filled with water for a couple of hours, and we were all submerged, floundering around in scuba suits and waiting for the…
The Last Book I Loved: The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
This is one damn weird love story. This is one strange quest. This is one bizarre boat. These are a couple of strange characters we’ve got here. This book feels…
A Novel, A Junta, A Murdered Bishop
A book—that’s an artifact, often long, filled with deep analysis, and pages, and made of paper—by Francisco Goldman undoes an electoral campaign, triggers assassinations, and drags its author into a…
The Future of Publishing Link List
There are a few hundred people currently writing, thinking, yapping, and occasionally (at best) in a position to do something about the future of the book industry. Most, though sadly…