Features & Reviews
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American Poet Missing
This one’s not a joke. Poet Craig Arnold has been missing in Japan for three days. The latest news we’ve heard is that the U.S. has sent helicopters and personnel to assist local authorities in searching a small volcanic island…
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STORIES WE RECOMMEND: “The Mourning Door”
Nearly a decade after Ploughshares published it, Elizabeth Graver’s short story “The Mourning Door” remains shrouded in a slippery surrealism that’s at once impenetrable and, simultaneously, the source of the piece’s staying power. In it, Graver’s pregnant narrator discovers a…
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What You Think is Sad: Gabriele Basilico and San Francisco Noir
She always knew it would come to this. A screaming horde of bucknaked smutcrazed rapists banging on her glass ticket kiosk. She crossed herself and with a single prayer commended her soul to the Lord’s Everafter and consigned her flesh…
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The Rumpus Interview with Lily Burana
Lily Burana is the founding editor of Taste Of Latex, the author of stripper memoir Strip City and Western novel Try.
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Swiss Dots for Depressionistas
There is, some believe, a place where short shorts and flash fiction fall in with fashion. The uncharted literary territory of J. Peterman; Brooks Brothers by way of Borges; J.Crew jewel tones via Jelinek. This stead for despairing fashionables is…
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We Are Each Other’s Spiders
Burnt Shadows is the most admirable new novel I have read in a long time, a work of astonishing naturalism, wisdom, and grace.
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Strunk and White take it on the chin
The Elements of Style, the classic writing handbook by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr., just turned fifty. The New York Times celebrated by posting the opinions of five “experts” on its blog about the book. All of them turn…
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A Girl Asleep in a Dream of Herself in a Dream
Gothic dreamscapes and hypnotic investigations of the self beguile the reader of Monica Ferrell’s debut collection.
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The World’s Foremost Consultant on the Future of Publishing
A DIRE PREDICTION Changes are coming to the publishing industry. Big changes. It’s not just the Kindle. There’s the iPhone. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. Blortcejil. If your company doesn’t already have a business plan in place for how to deal with…
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Sean Singer: A Poem I Love
Melvin Dixon’s “Spring Cleaning” Melvin Dixon died of AIDS in 1992 and is one of our most underrated poets. “Spring Cleaning” alludes to what Ralph Ellison called “the jagged grain,” the texture of experiencing the blues in one’s life. Dixon,…