Rumpus Recommends

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Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and trancendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost an dfound and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis... (read more)

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"War is seductive," Hedges tells readers in this powerful and intelligent book. Throughout our history, it has appealed to the human mind by providing a false sense of purpose and the opportunity to rise above everyday life. Using examples from his... (read more)

Staff Pick
Dave Eggers wowed even his most ardent skeptics with What Is the What, the "autobiography" of a Sudanese immigrant that Eggers wrote based on interviews with Valentino Achak Deng. Now Eggers is back with Zeitoun, which examines the disappearance of a... (read more)

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Nominated for the American Book Award, 'Ray' is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray- a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband- is a man trying to make sense of life in the... (read more)

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The End of Free Love evokes the schizophrenia of our times, a community of voices at the zero point. Like the voices that splinter from Marguerite Duras's work, these characters are neurotic, taking refuge in comics, food, music, sex, 'locking' and lies.... (read more)

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In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as... (read more)

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How do we come to be who we are sexually? How do we cope with the forces of desire? How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic? Daniel Bergner looks for... (read more)

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William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the... (read more)

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"So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter... But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving... (read more)

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Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective... (read more)