Other
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“Without the Spectacle, There is Nothing”
At Salon, Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay writes about the cheering of Sandusky’s guilty verdict, and our spectacle-centric culture. “The pictures are the story. The videos are the story. The confession of a broken man is the story. The protective…
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Notable San Francisco: 6/25-7/1
This Week in San Francisco: Monday 6/25: Books Inc. Opera Plaza hosts Daily Show contributors Lizz Winstead, author of Lizz Free or Die, and Kevin Bleyer, author of Me the People: One Man’s Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of…
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Notable New York, This Week 6/25-7/1
This week in NYC: MONDAY 6/25: Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya reads from The Watch, and will discuss with Anderson Tepper. McNally Jackson, 7pm, free. TUESDAY 6/26: Also at McNally Jackson, Glen Duncan discusses his most recent novel, Talulla Rising, with Megan Abbot…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Competence without comprehension. The Wizard of Oz, behind the scenes. An animated short film full of blue: “Backwater.” Human-powered helicopter hovers for 50 seconds.
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I Intend To Stop Writing About Gender Sometime I Swear
Last Saturday, after I posted the Gone Girl essay that turned into another gender-in-literature rant, I thought to myself, “Self, let’s find a new subject, surely your readers are getting bored. You are getting bored.” But then the Jonah Lehrer thing happened…
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The Contenders
The National Book Award Foundation recently launched an online exhibition devoted to the 373 books that were NBA Fiction Finalists between 1950 and 2011. Now a permanent part of the foundation’s website, the digital archive will expand each year as…
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“The Removals”
Rumpus columnist Nicholas Rombes has the first installment of a three-part story up at Berfrois. “They took you to the first house, and then, later, to the second. By the time they had removed you to the third house you…
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The Less You Tell
“For the shy and passive aggressive, blackmail might be the perfect means of control. Hone your blackmailing chops and you can utilize them in a range of scenarios: betrayal, revenge, moral castigation (theirs, not yours).” The Awl is in the…
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Pynchon Promotional Treasure Hunt
Have you seen this sticker? If you are a fan of author Thomas Pynchon, you’ll recognize the image as one of the key symbols from his 1966 book The Crying of Lot 49. You can find them scattered about in major cities…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
“I am throwing up in my hat. I am throwing up in my hat.” Drunk texts from famous authors. In an attempt to learn more about how human babies learn to speak, scientists at the University of Hertfordshire are building robots…
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“There are two things you don’t throw out in France – bread and books”
The New York Times reported yesterday on the notable difference between independent bookstores in France, and their struggling American counterparts. The article describes the way in which government intervention and price fixing for French-language books has buoyed printed literature in…
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Rebirth of the Epigram
“Twitter’s formal properties bend, simultaneously, in opposite directions: toward the essential but also the superfluous, the concise but also the verbose.” n+1 gets all philosophical about the tweet.