the bible
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Frenetic, Excitable, and Direct: Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs
This poem lets her—the speaker and Baumgartel—be too much.
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New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
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The Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
Connie Wanek discusses her latest book, Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, the challenge of looking back at older poems, and what prioritizing writing looks like.
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Mary Wept over Sex Worker’s Rights
At The Believer, Shannon Tien caught up with Chester Brown, graphic novelist and author of the newly released Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, which Tien describes as “essentially a layman’s interpretation of the Bible.” Mary Wept is a collection…
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All About Banned Books
Americans love banning books, and the winners of this year’s most banned books have been announced by the American Library Association. John Green’s young adult novel Looking for Alaska takes the top spot, keeping Green in the top ten. He…
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How to Title Your Next Novel
What patterns, dreams, and desires lie hidden within the ostensible hook of a novel’s title? Dustin Illingworth, for Lit Hub, explores the keys to a successful book title after considering, among others, The Sun Also Rises. They include not using the word “Trimalchio,” and…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Joe Meno
Joe Meno and Margaret Wappler dive deep into his new book, Marvel and a Wonder, talking about race, masculinity, and rural America.
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My Sister’s Legs
Because that’s how it is with sisters. You are them. You are not them. You are broken shards from the same pane of glass, each reflecting a different light.
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Where to Shelve Scripture?
At the New Yorker, Rollo Romig examines the unique position of scripture as literary genre through the lens of history, and with the help of Avi Steinberg’s recent nonfiction title The Lost Book of Mormon. Romig moves through a line of (relatively)…
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Don’t Read That Book
The history of banning books is almost as old as book themselves. Now Electric Literature has featured an infographic from Printerinks.com exploring that history, beginning with the Bible in 1440 and leading up to The Da Vinci Code in 2003.
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Secret Paintings Magically Appear in Old Books
If you haven’t yet seen these secret fore-edge paintings—paintings that appear on the side of the book opposite the spine when you squish the pages into a slanted line—they’re well worth a look. Both Flavorwire and io9 have posts with…
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Biblical Narratives Revisited
“Philip Esler’s book seeks to probe the mindset of ancient Israelite readers, to uncover their cultural presuppositions and to reveal the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilinear structures in which their narratives make sense.” Esler’s Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative…