Features & Reviews
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Literary Sports Links By Brian Schwartz
You might think that Terrell Owens, the star wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, would be a bit leery of the publishing business. After all, this is the man who complained about being misquoted in his own autobiography. But Owens…
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Poetic Lives Online: Random Poetry Links by Brian Spears
The inaugural poem is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the poetry world for now, and with good reason. An inaugural poem is even rarer than the Olympics, and gives poets the chance to really get their gripe…
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A (Not- comprehensive) List of Books That Changed The World
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World by Simon Garfield Banana: The fate of the fruit that changed the world by Dan Koeppel How William Shatner Changed the World by William Shatner
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Janet Malcolm on a Small Body of Early Twentieth Century Fiction
Janet Malcolm reaches into the archives of her childhood and discusses a hardly-known American novelist in an essay from the New York Review of Books. Malcolm reviews
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Mr. Alarcon Goes to Vegas
On Voting, People Who Collect the Folk Art of People With Whom They Have No Cultural Connection, and the Red-faced Waitress Who Pulled The Plug
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Obama Gets Advice from America’s Kids
Hot off the presses is a new book by kids titled Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country. Students of non-profit writing center 826 Valencia have
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Doughnuts & the Death of Journalism
What do doughnuts and the internet’s erosion of journalism have in common?
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Jonathan Baumbach Superlink
Writing (a novel, this post, anything) is “a bit like love.” Few are in it for the money or self-esteem; you pursue it because you can’t not and because at some point, it feels good and right and like one…
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The Shorty Q&A With Robin Maxwell
Female pirates, Leonardo DaVinci’s mother and cross-dressing, the sex lives of kings. Robin Maxwell writes about the parts of history that don’t air on PBS specials.
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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
I first interviewed Yiyun Li in 2005 when she won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, among many other awards, for her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Her first novel, The Vagrants, is forthcoming in February 2009.…
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Why I Write Fiction
by RABIH ALAMEDDINE When I was about to publish my first novel, a writer tried to prepare me for what was to come. It doesn’t matter what novel you write, she said, you will be asked how true it is.