Other
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Pay-What-You-Want Australian Lit Bundle
Wish you could have it all, for less? Australian ebook retailer Tomely.com is offering a pay-what-you-want promotion for a bundle of seven of Australia’s leading lit journals/collections (Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings, The Review of Australian Fiction, The Lifted Brow, Tincture, Sincere Forms…
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“You will be loved by people you’ve never met”
“I had started out in silence, written as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs.” A selection from…
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Language Log for Prairie Dogs
Con Slobodchikoff is a word nerd of a different sort than the ones we usually write about on the Rumpus. After studying prairie dogs for thirty years, he’s concluded that they have a language more complex than humans would ever…
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LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women.…
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No Wonder We Need Spelling Bees to Remember It All
Silent letters, multiple possible sounds per letter, counterintuitive letter combinations…why is English spelling so damn weird? David Crystal, author of linguistic history Spell It Out, explains the numerous and conflicting forces that, both intentionally and not, warped our orthography. Just one…
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Man to Purchase Drone, Drop Poems Instead of Bombs
The Los Angeles poet, translator, and filmmaker David Shook has created a Kickstarter campaign with the imaginative objective of purchasing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—i.e., a drone—to rain specially comissioned poems on cities around the world. The poems, printed on…
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Help Texan Women Beat SB5
Remember that scary Texas abortion bill we posted about yesterday? The one that would, among other woman-hating and unscientific measures, ban abortion 20 weeks after fertilization, without exceptions for rape victims because getting a rape kit done is apparently already…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Let’s all enjoy some pictures of DC’s early punk scene. India takes the next step towards dolphin personhood. Mapping every library and museum in America (is a good thing to do). On that theme, perhaps you would find the Tall…
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Bad News for English Majors
Last week, we blogged about how, contrary to popular opinion, English majors are, in fact, employable. But, argues Verlyn Klinkenborg, the misperception that the humanities are impractical career-wise is actually hurting the field, making it less practical in every way.…
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A Portrait of the Character as a Fictional Creation
Lovers of fiction and art (i.e., pretty much every Rumpus reader), listen up. The Modern Eden Gallery is San Francisco is hosting an exhibition called “Fiction,” in which artists portray literary characters from Dorian Gray to Alice in Wonderland to…
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Sylvia Plath Inspires Adoration, Scorn
Sylvia Plath has always been a polarizing figure, a fact underscored by the reaction to editions of her work recently released to mark fifty years since her death. Are her poems humorless or funny to the point of kitschiness? Was…
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Next Letter in the Mail: Andrea Portes
The next Letter in the Mail, going out Friday, June 14, is from Andrea Portes! Sign up by noon PT tomorrow if you’d like to receive her letter. Andrea is the author of two novels: the forthcoming Bury This, and the semi-autobiographical Hick, which…