Features & Reviews
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On Teaching Poetry to Women in Prison
I was nineteen. Prison seemed sexy and foreign—as did most forbidden things.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jack Pendarvis
I didn’t so much experiment as flounder around. But experiment is a nice word for it!
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Link to Drink: What Christopher Hitchens Gave Up God For
Rarely have I seen a Christopher Hitchens TV interview in which the atheistic author of God is Not Great isn’t knocking back an ice-clinking glass of whiskey of some brand or another. Yet, I never knew Hitch’s hootch of choice was Johnny Walker Black…
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The Silence of Thousands of Miles
A Review of Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore “The war is now a story. How will it get told?” – William T. Vollmann
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More John Updike Links
Mark Oppenheimer’s essay, “Why Everyone Used to Read Updike,” from five years ago, in which it occurs to him that “those frequent short stories that grab New Yorker space from younger, fresher voices, and those novels appearing at regular intervals, are not read by…
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John Updike
In literature there are many figures but few icons. John Updike published over 50 books which dug through the depths of suburban American lives, particularly our sex lives, once comparing a vagina to a ballet slipper. He contributed both fiction…
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Lost and Found
I first heard about Stoner back in grad school. I’d been on a Denis Johnson jag (weren’t we all?) and so naturally assumed the novel was a florid account of reefer madness. This is how Stoner begins: William Stoner entered…
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Poetic Lives Online: Random Poetry Links by Brian Spears
Oh, the things I’ve learned since I started doing this little column, the arguments I’ve lurked through, the long-winded defenses of one’s aesthetic choices, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m pulling out the fab stuff just for you. Martin Earl’s…
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The Shorty Q&A With Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Matthew Bernstein Sycamore was one of the early organizers of Gay Shame which, among other things, takes a stance against marriage in all forms.
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How My First Book Got Published
How many times do you really face a choice in life? How many times will you get the benefit of arriving at a crossroads, where you don’t have to fight the tug of rolling inertia, and your choice isn’t going…