Johns, Marks, Tricks, and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Chester Brown
Chester Brown is an award-winning Toronto cartoonist who wrote the graphic memoir Paying For It
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The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska
Every coffee slinger or fry cook is a drummer or bass player in a band covered by Pitchfork. One can live and work in an unfettered way, or at least a way less fettered than is possible in any major metropolis.
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Famous Rapes #1: Old Master Paintings
This is the first in a series of retrospective collage art focusing on myth, stories, historic events, and cultural attitudes about rape as seen through different time periods.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jess Walter
Novelist and short story writer Jess Walter explores fathers and sons, addiction, creating a Statistical Abstract, finding inspiration in the grocery store, and writing from a pure place of empathy.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #187
PERSONALIZED PENS
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing personalized pens.
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The Rumpus Interview with Karl Briedrick of Speck Mountain
The core duo of bliss-drone-space-twang group Speck Mountain formed when Karl Briedrick went looking for a singer for his Brooklyn-based band
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: In Sickness and in Health
Years after losing her entire family, the author takes a romantic vacation in paradise and instead must confront the physical manifestations of her grief.
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Saturday Rumpus Comic: The Dead Spider King
Last night I had a dream about my dead friend. He committed suicide six year ago. This was my third dream about him.
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Six Things Men Over Thirty Shouldn’t Do Near Women Under Twenty-Five
The long-door-hold seems to say, “I want to fuck you, look how nice I am, I’m just being a really nice guy is all.”
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Swinging Modern Sounds #45: The Distribution Problem, Part One
Rick Moody talks with Frank Zappa’s widow, Gail, about her new idea to license distribution rights of an unreleased project to Zappa fans.
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I Did Not Vanish: On Writing
But writing poems allows me mastery over a miniature universe. For those moments or hours, I am God of my kingdom. No one tells me how things go. No one can argue against me when I’m writing poems. When I am writing, I get to speak.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex #10: Peter Stenson
Just like that, I knew I’d been bamboozled. Stenson could write. The rest of the story sailed past and I found hardly a single occasion to complain, which is, for Super Hot Profs, a legitimate cause for despair.
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An Oyster Named Dan
In the following story, excerpted from Lucky Peach, one man meets a very special oyster, and together they embark on a fateful homeward journey.
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The Big Idea #4: Eve Ensler
Writer, journalist, activist, and lifelong feminist Eve Ensler talks with Suzanne Koven and explores the body’s relationship to the desecration of the earth, the importance of listening to the “real” in ourselves, and how it feels to be known as “the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues.”
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FUNNY WOMEN #102: How to Read a Poem
One misconception people have about poetry is that it is written in “code,” one they aren’t smart enough to understand. In fact, if you do not comprehend a poem, you may return it.
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Speech Therapy
They told my father three hours. Ideally, she would have needed to get to the hospital within three hours for the best chance of recovery from the stroke.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elliott Holt
Writer and Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt sits down to discuss her debut novel, You Are One of Them, her preoccupation with secrets, and working in 1990s Moscow during Russia’s economic transition.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #186
MY NEW COLOGNE
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing my new cologne.
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In Case of Emergency
I wanted to hide and quiet my mind by drowning it in alcohol, and I wanted a familiar place to do it. Much like my job, however, I had returned to something that no longer existed.
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THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #49: PAUL OF CAPTAIN PETE’S BAIT & TACKLE
Wendy C. Ortiz conducts a mini-interview with one of her favorite Facebook friends, who happens to be in a notorious motorcycle gang.
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Public Sex, Private Lives: The Rumpus Interview with Simone Jude
I wanted to present three complicated portraits that raise important questions, not just about what it means to be a porn performer, but what it means to be a sexually open woman
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Jokes Taught Me About Sex
This is what my parents told me about sex: nothing. Not one word. Ever.
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The Rumpus Interview with Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton
Discussing their collaborative book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton tackle neighbors, sexuality, and the fetishization of pets.
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ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: STEVE EARLE’S GUITAR TOWN
Before someone spilled Hi-C on it during a hot Iowa summer and my car window fixed sunlight into its silky black innards, warping Steve Earle’s voice into that of a sexually beleaguered chipmunk, that tape drove me through a lot.
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Braver
Adam Braver is a novelist, professor, and human rights activist, though not always in that order.
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The Danger of Perspective
One fall morning, we rose before dawn and drove bleary-eyed with my friend’s father down still-silent streets to a field where, in the company of other enthusiasts, we hitched a patchwork vinyl blanket to a basket, turned on the heat, and set sail. I think.
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The Rumpus Interview with Missy Mazzoli
We talked to composer-performer Missy Mazzoli about the sometimes invisible world of new classical music, her relation to it, and what she’s doing to help to redefine what it means to be a composer in the 21st century.
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