Features & Reviews
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A Review of Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation
Obsession distorts the lens through which we view the world; things that once seemed unfathomable become terrifically and terrifyingly plausible.
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The Rumpus Interview with Andrew Sean Greer
I’ve heard other novelists say this, which makes me feel like I’m not crazy, that the problem with every novel is finding the key to it, finding the way in.
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Jorge Luis Borges: “Reading has to be a happiness”
“For me death is a hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased and forgotten,” says Borges in this 1984 interview conducted by Professor of Philosophy Tomas Abraham, translated here for the first time into English. “When I’m sad, I…
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An OG Titan of Industry and the Future of the American City
Before Dick Fuld oversaw the implosion of Lehman Brothers, and before John Thain had to apologize for accepting an outrageous bonus from Merrill Lynch, there was Frank Woolworth. The gloss and shine that characterized New York pre-Crash of 1929, and then…
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Complex Innovative Literary Prize
The Warwick Prize for Writing is an “innovative new literature prize that involves global competition, and crosses all disciplines. The Prize will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre…
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Why You Should Not Be Afraid to Read “Little Women”
If anyone could be said to have really written in a garret, alone and oblivious, it is Louisa May Alcott.
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The Universal Threat of Loneliness
“The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz begins with the question, “What does the contemporary self want?” He answers after two sentences: “Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants . .…
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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…