Features & Reviews
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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.
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Poetry Shakedown
Kay Ryan’s tarot cards, the return of the rhyme, Mennonite matriarchs, Mao’s poems, Women’s Work, and Blago’s versification
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Companion Links to Ariel Levy’s Article on The Joy of Sex
“If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on The Joy of Sex, you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations.”
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Poetic Lives Online: Random Poetry Links by Brian Spears
With the inauguration of Barack Obama swiftly approaching (though not swiftly enough for some), the return of an inaugural poet/poem has gotten some play.