Features & Reviews
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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.
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The Garden of Eden
Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older than those of Stonehenge, dating to about 11-12,000 years ago.…
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Once the Shore: The Rumpus Review
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted…
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How Not to Lie
Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s a meandering, dreamy piece drifting between nostalgia and a hard-nosed…
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Kindle: Definition
From Merriam-Webster: Main Entry: kin·dle Pronunciation: \ˈkin-dəl\ Function: verb Etymology: Middle English, probably modification of Old Norse kynda; akin to Old High German cuntesal fire Date: 13th century Definition (1): transitive verb: to start (a fire) burning : light The…
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The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
It’s a tricky thing, a memoir of a death: you know how it’s going to end. The challenge for the writer (not only with regard to the conclusion) is making the inevitable unknown.
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Is the Internet Ruining Our Lives?
We’re distracted, our attention is shot, we are under surveillance, and we don’t care! We like being linked and friended by strangers who may or may not be who they say they are.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Yoon
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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Eliza Doolittle in the White House
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how he inhabits multiple voices. She reviews his first book Dreams…
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Poems for an Economic Collapse
Katy Lederer’s poems are both romantic and political in nature. With their attention to formal and lyrical concerns, these poems tackle the problems of desire when it coincides with money and passion.