Features & Reviews
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The Last Book I Loved: Away
I fall in love with books all the time. I remember periods of my life this way – like “what’s-his-name left me when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway” or “I got my first bra during the winter when I read…
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The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary
Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also the facilitator of the the oldest continuous free writers’ workshop…
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Monica Shores: The Last Book I Loved, Madeleine is Sleeping
My assertion is that you will not have read a novel quite like Madeleine is Sleeping because I hadn’t, until I read it. A young girl jerks off the local idiot and so her hands are burned in a pot…
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Robert Mailer Anderson:The Last Book I Loved, 2666
The last book I loved was Roberto Bolano’s 2666. His powers as a narrator are staggering. His abilities to both deconstruct the novel, while also somehow meeting the brutality and humor of his subject and characters head on is amazing…
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Life in the Woods
Peter Rock’s darkly evocative fifth novel follows a father and daughter’s underground existence in a city park.
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Jason Roberts: The Last Book I Loved, Soon I Will Be Invincible
I happen to agree that Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie) deserves its slot in the canon as one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. But Soon I Will Be Invincible uses language alone to take…
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Flannery on the Couch
In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
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Cobblers and Coverless Books
Doing well: shoe repair shops and, according to the Telegraph of London, used bookstores:
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Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to…
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The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of…
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The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it to bed at night—slip it under your pillow or shove…
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Let Them Eat Clicks
I have a piece in Friday’s Slate about Amazon.com’s seemingly nonexistent corporate philanthropy — and more importantly, whether that should matter. But I hid the real barb in the tail of the piece: