Jacket Copy
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June is Novella Month
How’s this for a definition of novella: “a novella, I think, looks through the narrow lens of a short story, and with a short story’s intense focus, at a small, precise part of the world, but it treats what’s within that…
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Happy to Be Called Horror
“JC: Though the book also has elements of horror, like Stephen King, it reads very differently than a Stephen King novel. Do you consider it in the horror genre? “VLV: It’s my great hope that this book will be considered…
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Are Printed Literary Journals Imperiled?
“For me, if there’s a piece of writing that I care about, I want to have the physical object,” says Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space. “There’s a permanence to it, a different kind of permanence…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Blog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it. Eggers on Salinger. Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via) “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!”…
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Staying Alive as a Poet, Artist, Etc.
“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.” Jacket Copy last…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
With the year winding down, the book blogs have been ablaze with your typical speculations about the best of this and that. But perhaps there are less obvious threads out there if we only knew where to look. . .…
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What Happens When Literary Journals Report The News?
With newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before…
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Studs Terkel And The FBI
“In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy — maybe if he’d gotten the job, we would have had “CSI: Studs Terkel.” But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that…
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“The Sexualization of Violence” and Comic-Con
There’s no easier way to recruit a legion of mortal enemies than to say something unflattering about the culture of comic books, but I’ve decided that I have nothing to lose today. Well, maybe I have something to lose, because…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are obsessed. They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both authors and look forward to reading both books, but this…
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
And I’m back! Thanks very much to Michael Berger for filling in for me while I was gone! He did a damn fine job. Lots has happened over the last few weeks: