Features & Reviews
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Fifty Years into Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep, Marlowe Still Speaks
Such is the subject of some fine summarizing in this week’s LA Weekly, which deserves ongoing props for going down with a fight and continuing to publish worthy writing on topics of interest despite the bosses and maladies of print.…
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Best American Nonrequired Blog
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is compiled by a team of high school students who spend the year reading everything they can get their hands on. The students debate the merits of the year’s crop of…
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The Political is the Personal
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new memoir about life in the Socialist Workers Party shows the effects of political idealism on a child’s upbringing
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The Last Book I Loved: Runaway
I came late to the Alice Munro party but now that I’m here I’m planted and staying. This book floored me—the first story, yes, good, interesting, intriguing, but it was story #2, “Chance” that handled storytelling and character and mystery…
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Jeffrey Rotter and the Politics of Paranoia
Jeffrey Rotter’s debut novel The Unknown Knowns concerns a pasty comic book collector whose inability to distinguish between the real and the fantastic leads to terrible consequences.
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Notes and Errata*: A Companion Guide to “The Unfinished”
*The Rumpus presents endnotes (and some additions and/or digressions) w/r/t “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max (The New Yorker, Mar. 9, 2009),
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A Reading List as Suggested Posthumously by David Foster Wallace
Compiled from “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max.
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A Jittery Spoonful of Surrealism
Monkeybicycle.net is the punchy literary magazine edited by Steven Seighman and Eric Spitznagel. The mag publishes writers like Tao Lin and Ryan Boudinot, and the piece on the site’s main page, “Wish” by Mike Valente, is representative of Monkeybicycle’s aesthetic.…
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Life’s Only as Bad as You Make It Out to Be
Chris Feliciano Arnold reviews Nami Mun’s debut novel, Miles from Nowhere.
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A Childish Fantasy
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted,…
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The Last Book I Loved: Alina Simone, Unlovable
Unlovable (Fantagraphics Books) is a graphic novel by Esther Pearl Watson that is based on a diary the author found in a gas station bathroom in the 1980’s belonging to one “Tammy Pierce.” True to the title, Tammy really is…