Features & Reviews
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The Storymatic
I’ve always been a sucker for writing prompts, even though they have a way of sometimes being cheesy, forced, and ultimately silly. But recently I came across this interesting product, a paper-based prompt generator that would seem to strike the…
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Wrack & Ruin
Don Lee returns to Rosarita Bay with a novel that features Brussels sprouts, kung fu divas, feuding brothers, and a complex look at ethnic identity.
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Binnie Kirshenbaum: The Last Book I Loved, A High Wind in Jamaica
Stories about pirates and orphans were my childhood favorites. Pirates, orphans, and those ever-so-enviable children–Madeline and Eloise–who lucked out with distant, absent, or dead parents: Pippi Longstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and Peter Pan, were winners for featuring distant parents and pirates.
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Working, as Adapted by Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar, the only famous comic-book creator who isn’t an artist himself, last month released a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working with The New Press. Dave Gilson summarizes it on Mother Jones as not “the most far-fetched attempt to…
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Yiyun Li’s “A Soldier Home”
Late last night I sat in the Labor & Delivery waiting room in the hospital where my brother and sister-in-law were preparing for the birth of their first child. They had checked in early that morning, but the baby still…
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North of the Border
A group of Mexican teenagers encounters a bizarre America in Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel.
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Infinite Summer
Infinite Summer is a Web site presenting the world with the following challenge/life-better-maker: “Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week.” Plus endnotes. The…
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Why Does No One Write About Their Day Job?
In a manifesto (er, “ideas piece”) about the importance of the workplace in writing, Alain de Botton calls on contemporary writers to write about work. “If a proverbial alien landed on earth,” he says, “and tried to figure out what human…
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“Sonnet like allusions are made to your gilt silk hair”
Next week, 600,000 pages of manuscripts, letters, drafts and journals will be put online from canonical British authors like Oscar Wilde, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and others. Included will be correspondence between Wilde and many of his lovers, including…
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This Book Stinks
Apparently, Marina Fiorato’s new novel The Madonna of the Almonds has a complementary perfume designed to smell like Renaissance Italy, the setting of her book. This strikes me as either ingenius or idiotic —probably both— and may just be another reminder…
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
It is spring, and the book blogs are horny! Will they be the type to lock themselves in a room with a suitcase full of porn? Or will they find someone who looks lonely and hit on them, not leaving…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books has published reviews of Christopher Buckley’s new memoir, the work of Sidney Wade, and two novels, including one about being Jewish — and accused of patricide — in Holocaust-era Austria.