Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Interview with Catherine Brady
“I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does… There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.”
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The Last Book I Loved: Atmospheric Disturbances
Galchen keeps us wound tight with anxiety, desperately waiting for some ray of hope for a man with a badly damaged mind and heart.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Centaur
I read The Centaur by John Updike out of funereal obligation, and had given up on it twice before, but this time put my misgivings to rest and plowed through what is surely the most tender evocation of father-son affection…
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No One Is Innocent
Yiyun Li’s arresting debut novel, The Vagrants, should be required reading for anyone interested in political fanaticism and state-sponsored tyranny.
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Jesse Nathan: The Last Book I Loved
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic was the last book I love love loved. It’s explosive, a text that’s sinewy and daring. It tears open the marks left on the narrator during the wars in the former…
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Nobody Can Enjoy Art Anymore
Vigilante justice: the new counterculture. Until it gets, like, totally commercial. That’s the premise of DeLeon DeMicoli’s novel, Lick Me, a spunky murder mystery saddled down with dull culture critique.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Wordy Shipmates
I fall in love pretty easily, so for me right now it’s Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which is her take on John Winthrop, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson of Puritan ancestry fame. I love it because Vowell’s feelings toward…
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Bookapocalypse
Thousands scramble for free books after Amazon used book vender abandons warheouse. There’s really some beautiful photography here, in addition to the many readings one could make of the article.
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Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the…
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Eric Blair, National Treasure?
Julian Barnes weighs in on three collections of George Orwell’s work— Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, compiled and with an introduction by George Packer; All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, again compiled by George Packer, with an introduction by Keith…
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The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running dialog back and forth for the story they were writing.
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The Shorty Q & A with Larry Smith
Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine keyed into the popularity and resonance of short, pithy bios even before “tweet” made its way firmly into the vernacular.