Recommended Reading: László Krasznahorkai’s “I Don’t Need Anything from Here,” which might be one of the shortest sentences he’s ever written.
“I would leave everything here”
Jack White, Publisher
Recommended reading: Lauren O’Neal writes for the LA Review of Books about analog music, Millennial poetry and Jack White‘s foray into publishing.
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New Year, New Interviews
For their first interview of 2013, The Rumpus talks to Zadie Smith, who also, if you’ll recall, told us about her Year in Reading last month.
Nebulous Plotlines
You’ve probably heard it before: never end a story with the phrase “it was all a dream.” Unfortunately for the person who taught you this rule, many classic stories (including Anna Karenina) take place at least partially in dreams. In the NYRB, Francine Prose investigates the trope in fiction.
The Return of Binge Reading
Novelist Ben Dolnick makes the case for indulging in a good binge-reading session.
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Doc Brown: Hippie?
Back to the Future II originally featured a very different Doc Brown from the one that made the final cut. Behold Doc’s 1967 alias, his hippie parents, and his apparent affinity for motorcycles in this 147-page script (PDF) that was later re-purposed into the movie we know today. (The Bizarro Doc action picks up around page 90.)
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That Used To Be You
“The day you follow me to that mound of oyster shells on the beach is the day I realize muscle and bone have been at war for a long, long time.” The Saturday Rumpus essay by Ashley Inguanta is tender and poetic. Some past iterations are also well-worth a revisit.
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Borges’s Best-Of
Jorge Louis Borges’s suggestions for the thirty-three books to begin his famed Library of Babel includes works by Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, and even Borges himself–and, maddeningly, no women. Nothing against Borges, but you may want to spend some time with our own slightly more diverse Year in Reading series for a bit more variety.
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