Houston
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Are great bookstores just good capitalism? People are more concerned with being fat than with eating disorders, if we go by the number of books in each respective section at one blogger’s local bookstore. A Tennessee bookstore will include a…
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Finding Shelter
A hurricane is coming. Rita is in the Gulf of Mexico and is approaching Houston at a slow but steady pace of nine miles an hour. I don’t have many, or any, illusions that God and Jesus will see us…
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Best-selling author James Patterson is handing out bonuses to bookstore employees once again, celebrating the people who make best-selling authors possible. The Daily Beast has a roundup of some of the best independent bookstores across the country. As if you…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat
It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
James Patterson is giving away $2,000,000 in holiday bonuses to bookstore workers and libraries. An adults-only sex shop in Anchorage, Alaska is getting remade into an indie bookstore. Philadelphia’s Hakim’s Bookstore, a landmark African-American shop, is a small business on…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Our Will
All that floated there was the mystery. In the presence of all that, I discovered too that there are mysteries residing in the consciousness of my own mind that I don’t want to get out of the way of.
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Roots and Ragtime
John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel chronicle the rise, fall, and in-between wanderings of Houstonian booksellers, civil rights activists, reporters, and musicians—in oversized, Texan fashion. Most people have heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, canonical English poet and laudanum addict. Far…
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.
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Ghost Horse Wins Award
Congratulations to Rumpus reviewer Thomas H. McNeely for winning the 9th Annual Gival Press Novel Award! The winning novel, Ghost Horse, tells “the story of a boy’s journey to escape an abusive relationship with his father and to discover the truth about his…
