Michael Berger
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Things To Look Forward To In 2010
“The Notebook is the collected entries from 87-year-old Saramago’s blog, O Caderno de Saramago. The book, ‘which has already appeared in Portuguese and Spanish, lashes out against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope, Israel and Wall Street,’ according to…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Good morning my fellow Rumpusians, as Christmas steadily approaches and the panic to procure becomes almost reptilian, I can honestly say I’ve never handled so many one hundred dollar bills. Are there that many people out there with so much…
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Paul Bowles, Travel and the Non-Christian World
“With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it. Even the works of man, unless they are being used in his daily living, have a way of losing their meaning, and…
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Adventures in Russian Literature: An Upcoming Adventure
“They couldn’t figure out exactly where the book fit. Part literary criticism, part travel writing, part memoir, Batuman’s collection of seven nonfiction pieces moves from the campus of Stanford University to Uzbekistan, contemplating everything from Isaac Babel to an overweight…
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Honoring an Amazing Writer and Father
“He had raised three of us single-handedly following my mother’s premature death when we were five, seven and nine. It was the 60s, when single fathers didn’t do that sort of thing. Most of his friends were sceptical. But he…
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Zines Have Their Own Wiki
I’m as enthralled by, addicted to and dependent on the Internet as anyone, but a part of me is nostalgic for something that is still being made by hand, with paper and ink and imperfect binding: the zine. I think…
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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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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Greetings my fellow aesthetes, epicurians, book junkies and all around fine people! I’m back in the Sunday guest side-car for today and next week while our legendary Seth Fischer prepares to graduate!
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John Crowley’s Little Lessons From The Masters
“He writes with a typewriter, beginning with the first page, with a situation he has been brooding about, and some sense of the implications or characters involved, but no real storyline. He probes forward with this, discovering as he goes…
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What Buildings Would You Ban?
“Fear, on one side, of watching Europe turn into “Eurabia” —even if the demographics don’t justify such worries—and, on the other, of seeing centuries’ worth of social liberalization—including women’s suffrage and gay rights—fall apart in the face of religious conservatism,…
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Water Causes Cancer And Other Truths
Time Magazine has already called it “The Decade From Hell.” (Couldn’t have been worse than the 1940’s?! Could it? I mean the 40’s had Hitler AND Stalin.) And if you have survived the “aughts” reasonably intact as we caterwaul our…