Reviews
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Life’s Only as Bad as You Make It Out to Be
Chris Feliciano Arnold reviews Nami Mun’s debut novel, Miles from Nowhere.
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The Poetry of Plunder: Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower’s first collection of short stories meditates on danger and beauty—and it’s funny as hell.
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The Rumpus Original Combo: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.”
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They’re Called Cells for a Reason
A review of Micrographia People don’t read enough, and when they do, they don’t ask the questions of themselves that Micrographia demands.
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Notes from Underground
The world will end in a matter of hours… unless Lowboy can lose his virginity.
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Life in the Woods
Peter Rock’s darkly evocative fifth novel follows a father and daughter’s underground existence in a city park.
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Flannery on the Couch
In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
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Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to…
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No One Is Innocent
Yiyun Li’s arresting debut novel, The Vagrants, should be required reading for anyone interested in political fanaticism and state-sponsored tyranny.
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Nobody Can Enjoy Art Anymore
Vigilante justice: the new counterculture. Until it gets, like, totally commercial. That’s the premise of DeLeon DeMicoli’s novel, Lick Me, a spunky murder mystery saddled down with dull culture critique.
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Once the Shore: The Rumpus Review
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted…