Features & Reviews
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How Books Got Their Titles
A blog about how famous books got their titles, peppered with amusing and surprisingly sexual anecdotes. John Cleland’s title Fanny Hill is dirty, but not for the reasons you might think. Marie Stopes’ 1918 Married Love might be the most…
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Benjamin Sarlin: The Last Book I Loved, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go
I don’t think I’ve had more fun with any recent read than last year’s I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most…
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The Last Book I Loved: Too Big to Miss
I used to read lots of mysteries, and for some reason I stopped. Then I heard about Sue Ann Jaffarian’s mysteries from Mystery Bookstore on Twitter, and got addicted. Her heroine is plus-size paralegal Odelia Gray, and she’s an amateur…
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Notes from Underground
The world will end in a matter of hours… unless Lowboy can lose his virginity.
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Battle of the Books
“Best novel” awards are not often thrown into metaphorical convergence with mixed martial arts. However, as the founders of the Tournament of Books point out, “Everyone knows that, behind the scenes, the National Book Award is both arbitrary and brutal,…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Michael Uslan
Comics and movies with the man who has owned the film rights to Batman for thirty years.
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Ainsley Drew: The Last Book I Loved, Back to Basics
Barefoot Contessa: Back To Basics. My version of cooking usually involves a box, water, and a microwave, but Ina Garten breaks it down in a way that even culinary Tripp Palins like myself can grasp. I know what you’re thinking,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Rosenberg
Five years ago, a new poetry contest entered the scene with relatively little fanfare.
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Ariane Conrad: The Last Book I Loved, The Emperor of Scent
The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr. Luscious writing from Burr, and an outstanding lead in Luca Turin as he’s caught in the intrigues of the perfume industry and scientific community. A nonfiction thriller.
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Welcome to Rumpus Books
At The Rumpus, we believe that a healthy literary culture is one which embraces writing of all kinds, by authors of all stripes – young and old, established and emerging, traditional and experimental, writing from the margins or from (or…
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The Last Book I Loved: In A Lonely Place
The book I am reading and loving right now is In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. I have known and loved the Humphrey Bogart movie based on the novel for a long time. The movie is about a…
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Reese Kwon: The Last Book I Loved, The Modern Element
Sometimes I separate the books I intend, one day, to read, into two groups: the Bookcase of Desire, and the Bookcase of Guilt. Desire is made up of anticipated pleasures, the books I haven’t yet read only because time is…