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.
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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 repackage it over and over again, like Bruce Willis did…
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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 the disease, centered on her latest stint in a Manhattan…
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What Is Found
In Patrick Somerville’s novel, an expectant father must decide what kind of man he wants to be.
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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 systems perhaps smart enough to compete on “Jeopardy!” All astonishing…
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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 called a contemporary classic but for one thing: It’s only…
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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 world to return. The details of the nascent civilization that…
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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 like a dare, as in I dare you not to…
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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 political minefield in Guatemala. But can the tome bring closure…
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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 not all, take the position that writing, and reading, will…