Bookforum
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The Rumpus Interview with Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll discusses his newest collection Transitory, the influence of film on his writing, and getting good news at bad times.
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Women and Instrumentality
She hasn’t been shown any other options. But can she invent a new option? Over at Bookforum, Anelise Chen sits down with Alexandra Kleeman, author of the new collection Intimations, to talk about femininity, dread, and menace in her stories,…
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The Read Along: Megha Majumdar
Megha Majumdar on Russian spies, child-sized newspapers, and why reading difficult fiction can invigorate, rather than depress.
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The Rumpus Interview with Amy Sohn
At the end of the day, all we have to hold onto, really, is other people’s stories. And that’s how Alizah Solario’s series “Writers on Wheels Getting Tea” was born. The first interview features author Amy Sohn.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Bauman
Bruce Bauman discusses his latest book, Broken Sleep, why rock isn’t dead (yet), how humor makes life bearable, and why we should reinstate the draft.
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Dog Sees God
A preacher cares for his daughter’s child while she has a nervous breakdown in a foreign land. A teenager watches her mother slowly die. Another teen mourns his father, who that summer had been “executed by the state of Florida.”…
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The Greatest Experimentalist You’ve Never Heard Of
She felt that this approach illuminated a fundamental truth about language: The very act of using language, she once told an interviewer, involves a ‘castration. The moment we utter a sentence, we’re leaving out a lot.’ A “nanopress” has begun…
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L-IT-erature
Cohen is the perfect age to write such a book, having lived approximately an even number of years on either side of the pre-Web/post-Web divide. He gets “kids these days” and partakes of their Net-fueled narcissism, owning it in a…
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The End of the Diary
Over at Bookforum, Caitlin Johnson touches base with Sarah Manguso about her new memoir Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, motherhood, and a lifetime spent recording memories and experiences. And for even more on Ongoingness, and Manguso’s thoughts about how motherhood does (or doesn’t) change being a…
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Facebook and the Avant-garde
…our Franzen problems, these days, are pretty minor. We don’t have to worry that Chip Lambert’s hand-wringing is going to reinforce the old, realist modes of romantic reaction. But we do have to worry about what happens to attempts to…
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Way Back When
In the middle of a digression on the bar scene in Kansas, Edmund White took a moment to question its authenticity: Sometimes gay friends my age or older ask me if I ever miss the good-bad old days before gay…
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Among the Damned
Reminded of a quote from Charles Baxter — “‘if you want a compelling story…put your protagonist among the damned” — Jabai Asim argues, in Bookforum’s “Daily Review” that while Ferguson is intriguing as a historical moment, it’s just as important…