Features & Reviews
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Journal Highlight: Conjunctions and the New Weird, a Non-Genre
Conjunctions: 52, Betwixt the Between, its Spring 2009 issue, has just been released. According to the Editors’ Note, the issue explores what happens when the “borderlands of the normal and absurd…are breached.” This breach is bare in Secret Breathing Techniques,…
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THE LONELY VOICE #4: John Edgar Wideman Confronts
Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards.
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The Last Book I Loved: Bleak House
Bleak House is a magnificent book, surprising and delightful and heartbreaking and wild.
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I’ve Always Wondered Where The Black Hats
Get their black hats. Same place as Gay Talese. Homburgs, fedoras, no creases, creases — Bruno Lacorazza is a name you can trust. Hasidic hats even get hasidic-ish style names: yeshivish (generic fedora) and shtreimel (fancy and furry)!
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Exquisite Corpses
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford’s Facebook status messages are queries for the world, not just for his friends. In a special Rumpus bricolage, we are pleased to present Ariane Conrad’s take on the brilliant Slow Poetry of Morford’s Wall.
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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 David Foster Wallace on the Rumpus, and you’ll find a…
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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…