Features & Reviews
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Down in the Dumpster
“What Joshua Mohr is doing has more in common with Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Haruki Murakami, all great chroniclers of the fantastic. He’s interested in something weirder than mere sex, drugs, and degradation.”
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Louis Menand on Creative-Writing Programs
Louis Menand has really been on a roll this year. First the must-read article about how the Village Voice changed journalism, then the article on Donald Barthelme, and now this week, an essay about The Program Era by Mark McGurl,…
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All that Glitters
What was it like to be Jewish, and accused of patricide, in Holocaust-era Austria?
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Frontiers in Reading
It’s not only boy wizards and teen vampires who can still ignite a book frenzy: as already reported in The Rumpus, Haruki Murakami’s two-volume (or longer?) new novel 1Q84 came out this week in Japan. It has already broken sales…
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The Brandon Book Crisis
First Dan Baum’s Twitter missives and now this: The Brandon Book Crisis, a paperback “thriller” about book design featuring 140+ pages of unedited Gmail chats, text messages, voicemails, and emails between Brandon Scott Gorrell, Tao Lin, and others.
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The Last Book I Loved: First Love and Other Stories
Falling in love with a book is as much about the book itself as reading it at the right time. I picked up First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev (Oxford Press) at a used bookstore in South Bend…
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2009 Woolf and the City Preview
On the heels of BEA comes the 2009 Woolf and the City conference, an event of modern proportion, which will be bringing fans of Virginia Woolf to the campus of Fordham University in New York from June 4-7. Keeping things…
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The Lightness of Sidney Wade
Her lightness is not merely pointing out the details of the world but showing us that without the glory of the everyday, the parsnip, for instance, there can be no weight lifted.
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On the Inner Voice
In preparation for a move, I’ve been cleaning out my files, and today I found an article I clipped from the June 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine and stowed away: The Inner Voice, by Denise Riley. (Subscription and registration is…
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The “Complete” Cosmicomics of Italo Calvino
Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation reports that later this year, Penguin UK will publish a so-called complete Cosmicomics. The volume combines stories “which had previously been spread out across several volumes, or which were untranslated.”
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Losing Mum and Pup, A Liberal’s Guilty Pleasure
I wonder, when a humorist writes a book not intended for laughs. When, say, the very funny satirist, Christopher Buckley, writes a memoir – say, Losing Mum and Pup – about the deaths of his legendary parents in 2007 and…
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The Gotham Style
There’s a fantastic article on Life Without Buildings, Jimmy Stamp’s blog about architecture out of context, on how Gotham City came to have the look we know from the Tim Burton films (within the Batman universe, that is) and includes a…