Rumpus Original
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Reading in the New Year
Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb? Some questions…
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Lounge Music
This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.
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My Year In Books
As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones…
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Look! Look! Feathers
Mike Young’s debut collection sifts through the lives of characters on the fringe, grounding moments of the surreal in a world that is frighteningly real.
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Reading Habits of the Service Industries, Part One
Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last…
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Shape of a Key, of a Dog, of a Letter
Cassian’s strongest poems–and there are many of them in Continuum–function in this way, where the initially familiar becomes a catalyst for something pleasurably disorienting as she subverts the expectations that she initially led us to have.
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Falling in Love with AHWOSG 10 Years Later
I hate it when people buy me books for the holidays. I’m a firm believer that certain books enter into our lives at exactly the right moments, and if a well-meaning gift-giver were to intervene with the latest Nicholas Sparks…
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A Clouded Thing
Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-winning novel conveys the hard-knock world of horseracing in a style reminiscent of Walker Percy and Mark Twain.
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CIA Response to WikiLeaks: “WTF”
A report from the Washington Post on Wednesday describes an effort by the CIA to assess the impact of WikiLeaks on U.S. national security. The effort is known as the WikiLeaks Task Force. Apparently it’s also commonly referred to as…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #67
PEPPER SPRAY ★★★★★ (1 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing pepper spray.
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GENERATION GAP #7: Mario Tama’s New Orleans
Now that It is over—now that the circus has come and gone, its glaring lights, its grips and its roadies; now that the visiting dignitaries have made their dignified departures and the newspapers have returned to publishing news
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Happy Holidays: Electric Santa
A warm “Happy Holidays!” from all of us here at The Rumpus. Please accept Rumpus artist Ian Huebert’s fantastic art (which you can purchase here) as our humble gift to you, our beloved Rumpus readers: