The Paris Review
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The Rumpus Interview with Jenny Johnson
Poet Jenny Johnson discusses her forthcoming debut collection, In Full Velvet, phobias, courage, the dual consciousness of queer lovers, and what it means to belong.
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A Game About a Memoir About Games
Michael Clune learned about the space between our own minds and those of others through video games. You can bridge that mental space by reading Gamelife, his memoir of a childhood spent playing Suspended and The Bard’s Tale II. Or…
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Beig’s “Disappearing World”
For the Paris Review, Matthew Neill Null wonders why American presses have yet to “take up” the catalog of German novelist Maria Beig, speculating that some might see her depiction of rural life as “too pat”: Will anyone in America give a…
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Nancy Drew, Girl Detective and Mentally Unstable Shape-Shifter
In her many faces, the detective has always been both infinite and infinitely replicable, a paper-doll chain folded easily into a single entity, or expanded accordion-style into a string of captivating almost-duplicates. To become a top-rate teenage sleuth, you’ve got…
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The Rumpus Interview with Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy discusses his latest novel, The Dead Lands, why it’s all about keeping language fresh, and his dream job writing for DC Comics.
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The Survival of Scripts
Newspapers might be threatened by e-readers, technology may have supplanted books, and recipes can be found online in abundance. But scripts? Scripts are necessary. Scripts are tangible. They bow before no millennial’s avowedly shortened attention span. The Paris Review argues…
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The Rumpus Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her first full-length novel, Eileen, betrayal, self-aware narrators, and the catalytic properties of friendship.
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Dry Magazines
Desert managed, impressively, to publish lively, intelligent writing about a very dry place, month after month. Dan Piepenbring browsed through archive.org’s huge magazine collection to discover Desert, a publication from the Southwest entirely devoted to… deserts! You can read more…
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Preserving Dostoevsky’s Prose
What’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated…
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Revenge Writing
After about two years of writing essays, I learned about something I will hereby in these pages name the Passive-Aggressive Writer’s Conundrum: People, particularly non-writers, are an optimistic, delusional bunch. If you mention people in an unflattering way without naming…
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All-American Girl
Over at the Paris Review, Brit Bennett profiles the role, or lack thereof, of black dolls among Americans today: Of course, you can still buy racist dolls. Golliwogs—blackfaced rag dolls—are still sold in the United Kingdom; only in 2009 were…
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A Séance for Robert Browning
The voice of the dead man was heard speaking… In breathless silence the little, awed group stood round the phonograph, [as] Robert Browning’s familiar and cheery voice suddenly exclaimed: “Ready?” Poet Robert Browning may not have been able to remember…