Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”
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Random Brilliant Ephemera
“I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything,” says Luc Sante, introducing his blog, Pinakothek. “Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.” Sante…
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The Rumpus Interview with Don Waters
“That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive.”
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Fiction by La Farge
The long short-story is not a particularly popular form, but Paul La Farge packs life into exactly that bag. It’s a bag Kafka and Chekov used with gusto–think of the Metamorphosis or The Duel. In Bleak College Days, La Farge…
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The Shorty Q & A with T Cooper
T Cooper is has been labeled a transgender writer, but to boil it down to a phrase so simple and limiting is an insult. After two critically acclaimed novels, Some of the Parts and Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes,…
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Rude Brittania
Tim Fountain has made a career out of talking about sex, most famously in his 2005 sell-out one-man show ‘Sex Addict’. In a sort of reality show built around Gaydar, Fountain would go on stage every evening and, using the…
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Something the Internet Can’t Do
Rodrigo Corral Design offers one reason we shouldn’t lose print media. These books, these beautiful, vibrant, resplendent books, remind us what it feels like to be human, to interact directly with art, and to connect what looks good with what…
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A Questioning Faith
A Review of Dan Albergotti’s The Boatloads I have a special place in my heart for literature that juxtaposes the sacred and profane, that challenges perhaps the most successful meme ever to spring from the human brain: the belief that…
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More Rules of Writing
In 2001, Elmore Leonard, famous for his crime fiction and suspense thrillers, wrote a spicy essay for The New York Times cataloging his suggestions for good writing, or, rather, he lists what we shouldn’t do. He continues his list of…
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The (Old) New Leader
In January 2006, The New Leader stopped print publication, an early omen to The Christian Science Monitor. But this eighty-five-year old magazine continues to publish bimonthly in the form of PDF on their website. In its heyday, The New Leader…
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A Call for Writing Advice
Q: How Do You Crank Up to Write? A: “Discipline.” John Updike did it all the time, Richard Ford did it early in the morning, Nathaniel Hawthorne did it nonstop, Philip Roth and Thomas Wolfe while standing, and Jane Kramer…