Features & Reviews
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“Stripping is as much a part of who I am as my Ph.D.”
$pread‘s Will Rockwell takes a stroll with Craig Seymour in New York’s Lower East Side to get the dish on the debut of Seymour’s recently released memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington,…
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The Poetry of Plunder: Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower’s first collection of short stories meditates on danger and beauty—and it’s funny as hell.
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Scott Hutchins: The Last Book I Loved, The Easter Parade
It seems that every once in a while living writers pick a dead writer to gather around and champion, and this was definitely the case with Richard Yates around the turn of the millenium. I attended a reading by Richard…
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Secondhand Bookiestore
A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes one of the more unusual uses for a bookstore that…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Road
This semester, I decided to teach The Road by Cormac McCarthy. After I got my desk copy, I was sitting on BART, on my way home, and I started rereading the ending to try to figure out how McCarthy made…
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The Rumpus Original Combo: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.”
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Chandler’s Reverse Romances
March 26, 2009 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Raymond Chandler, the most important American detective fiction writer of the twentieth century.
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Damion Searls: The Last Book I Loved, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories
I could never tell him apart from the other ones, Asch and Abramovitsh and Aleichem and the rest. And those titles like “Gimpel the Fool,” straight from the old country? Well Singer, and the translator of “Gimpel the Fool,” some…
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Sean Kim: The Last Book I Loved, Last Evenings on Earth
It used to be that exile was unique to small, tight knit immigrant communities, but now I know it’s just a condition of living in the world. Roberto Bolano proves it. For him, exile is a life lived in existential…
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Padma Viswanathan: The Last Book I Loved, Dancing With Cuba
The most recent book I have loved–a term I apply only to those few books that get a place in my personal canon–was Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba. Guillermoprieto’s books are great but few, so I saved this most recent…
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They’re Called Cells for a Reason
A review of Micrographia People don’t read enough, and when they do, they don’t ask the questions of themselves that Micrographia demands.
