The Rumpus.net

The Insanity of Eating

By Michael Sinert

August 22nd, 2016

I didn’t usually consider how the binge felt. I just ate until I couldn’t eat anymore. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Nina Stibbe

By Catherine Cusick

August 22nd, 2016

Author Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism. ...more

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Distance Devotion

By Edward Helfers

August 21st, 2016

If I understood the difference between good and great in that moment, it would be years before I came to accept it. ...more

The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Ramona Ausubel

By Penny Perkins

August 20th, 2016

I find tremendous hope in the act of storytelling—the way we can redirect energy, to reclaim history, to build back lives that have been otherwise upset. ...more

Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial

By Elysha Chang

August 19th, 2016

Growing up, I understood my father through observation, and I suspect that he understood me much the same way. I liked to think our love was purer that way. Like two stray dogs who found each other and are blessed enough to just get along. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Rich Cohen

By David Breithaupt

August 19th, 2016

Rich Cohen discusses his new book The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, writing book proposals, and interviewing rock stars. ...more

Florence Foster Jenkins, Meryl Streep, and White Feminism

By May-lee Chai

August 18th, 2016

Streep’s career encapsulates the mid-to-late 20th century ideal of American whiteness as aspirational and as attainable. ...more

PJ Harvey - Stories from the City | The Rumpus

Sound Takes: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

By Stephen Akey

August 18th, 2016

At once soothing and horrifying, it became for me the soundtrack of grief and hope for my wounded city and country. ...more

The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rion Amilcar Scott

By The Rumpus Book Club

August 17th, 2016

Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new collection Insurrections, creating a fictional town, and the pressure to make religious decisions during puberty. ...more

Visible: Women Writers of Color #4: Jaquira Díaz

By Deesha Philyaw

August 17th, 2016

Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models. ...more

R.I.P. #7: Naiveté

By Lee Matalone

August 16th, 2016

Nearly a decade ago, on what was then my first and only day in Paris, I saw a dead person for the first time. ...more

Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape

By Bonnie Johnson

August 16th, 2016

I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets. ...more

Remnants

By Amy Robillard

August 15th, 2016

There were six people under the same roof, surviving but not living. Because living requires stories. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Arielle Greenberg

By Nicole Guappone

August 15th, 2016

Arielle Greenberg talks about her new collection, Locally Made Panties, the possibility of feminist pornography, and curating her Rumpus column, (K)ink: Writing While Deviant. ...more

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Skinning the Wildcat

By Ian Belknap

August 14th, 2016

My son was not born my son. My son was born my daughter. ...more

The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Heirlooms

By Naseem Jamnia

August 13th, 2016

The strings of our DNA mark us as one, but it’s the roots of our memories that bind us. ...more

The Life Jacket

By Anne Gudger

August 12th, 2016

How later you learned grief and love are partners too. How love held you through grief’s fire. ...more

HORN! REVIEWS: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

By Kevin Thomas

August 12th, 2016

Textbooks obfuscate the past, making science seem a smooth and cumulative process. ...more

The Rumpus interview with Stuart Dybek

By Olivia Kate Cerrone

August 12th, 2016

Stuart Dybek discusses the forthcoming The Best Small Fictions 2016, the invisibility of anecdote, and why the art of transition is the art of the short story. ...more

The Rumpus Review of Seoul Searching

By Claire Jia

August 11th, 2016

Seeing is a critical part of normalizing, and though it seems like a rudimentary expectation, it’s important for American audiences to see Korean-Americans simply living their lives. ...more

Wanted/Needed/Loved #11: Jad Fair

By Allyson McCabe and Esme Blegvad

August 11th, 2016

If you’re doing what makes you happy, it’s easier for you to be happy, and if you’re lucky, to make others happy too. ...more

A Case, Diagnosis, and Its Findings

By Shuly Cawood

August 10th, 2016

There was nothing open about my heart; my chest tightened, threatening to implode. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt

By Tracy O'Neill

August 10th, 2016

Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature. ...more

The Read Along #4: Jessa Crispin

By Kelsey Osgood

August 9th, 2016

Jessa Crispin on reading abroad, watching ships chug through the Bosporus, and watching Outlander. ...more

Spotlight: Jon Gant’s You & Me

By Jon Gant

August 9th, 2016

Told in second-person narrative, You & Me is a nostalgic and humorous collection of observations, memories, and dreams. ...more

H.I.P. Lit and The Rumpus Present: Dark Nights, Bright Words

By Rumpus Events

August 8th, 2016

Celebrate literature and savor the last days of summer with "Dark Nights, Bright Words," presented by H.I.P. Lit and The Rumpus! ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein

By Sarah Lyn Rogers

August 8th, 2016

Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as "an idea that someone else pushes back on." ...more

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Losing at Memory

By Lea Page

August 7th, 2016

But I didn’t understand, then, how important memory is, for how do we know who we are without memory? How does anyone else know who we are, but for their memories of us? ...more

The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval

By Chip Livingston

August 6th, 2016

I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry. ...more

Voices of Addiction #3: Mother’s Day

By Rebecca Hathaway

August 5th, 2016

I will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame. ...more

The Rumpus Blog

Punk Magic

Over at Hazlitt, Tobias Carroll writes about the intersection of punk and magic in various fictional works, from The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell to the Hellblazer comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a surprisingly varied history of what might, at first, seem like a pairing that just shouldn’t work, but does, deliciously.

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Just Kidding

Heads up, Harry Potter fans: the staff over at VICE confirm that J.K. Rowling will be coming out with three more short stories about Hogwarts. The stories will provide background to some of the secondary characters in the Harry Potter series:

Power, Politics, and Pesky Poltergeists centers on Voldemort’s ties with Professor Horace Slughorn at Hogwarts; Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies offers a look into Professor McGonagall’s roots; and Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide provides readers with everything they ever wanted to know about Harry’s prestigious wizarding school.

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The Book as Scholarship

At Open Letters Monthly, Rohan Maitzen questions the measurement of scholarly value in academia, and suggests scholars should reevaluate the book as the be-all, end-all when it comes to informing others in their field of new developments.

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Call Center Blues

We’re always happy to celebrate our friends’ work, so we’re pleased to announce that Rumpus alum Casey Dayan has released a new single with his band, Mootheband. Listen to the track, “Call Center Blues,” after the jump, and stay tuned for more Mootheband, coming soon! (more…)

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To Speak Unsatisfactorily

To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence.

For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with artistic expression as the aestheticization of truth, almost necessarily a “mangling,” when the goal is to memorialize or find deeper truth in the wake of tragedy and violence.

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Subjectively Sporting

At Hyperallergic, Gretta Louw reviews a new exhibit in Berlin, Contesting/Contexting SPORT. The transdisciplinary exhibit seeks to address the gross fallacy that professional sports can be removed from the politics of race, gender, and policed bodies.

— 8 hours ago (0)

Save Langston Hughes’s Harlem Home

Award-winning author Renée Watson is fighting to save the house that Langston Hughes lived in through much of the 1950s and 60s, until his death in 1967, Heather Long reports for CNN. Watson launched an Indiegogo campaign to rescue the brownstone and preserve its literary history—donate here today to make sure we don’t lose this important piece of American poetry’s past.

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Notable Los Angeles: 8/22–8/28

Monday 8/22: Georgia Clark discusses and signs The Regulars. 7 p.m. at Book Soup.

Tuesday 8/23: Nile Green discusses and signs The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London. 7 p.m. at Book Soup.

Ann Hood discusses and signs The Book That Matters Most. 7 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore.

Serena Burdick presents and signs Girl in the Afternoon. 7 p.m. at Chevalier’s Books.

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Weekend Rumpus Roundup

First, in the Saturday Interview, Penny Perkins speaks with Ramona Ausubel about Ausubel’s latest novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, her previous collections, and “the ways that stories change the real chemistry of the world.”

Then, Jeff Lennon reviews Cynthia Cruz’s “swirling” fourth poetry collection, How The End Begins. A well-chosen order helps to keep the collection cohesive. Cruz’s “narrative,” Lennon writes, “is a weaving of dreams and visions, drugs, madness, the ups and downs, days of light and of darkness, of a depressive, or of a madwoman.”

Meanwhile, Brandon Hicks shares a story of disassociation and distraction in “My Roommate’s Trick.”

Finally, dreams of glory in the world of competitive swimming dominate Edward Helfers’s world in the Sunday Essay. As a teen, Helfers pushes himself relentlessly, training his body to the point of exhaustion. One day, he watches a thirteen-year-old Michael Phelps compete in the butterfly. The encounter leads Helfers to reevaluate his Olympic dreams.

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The Pleasure of Recognition

Ferrante’s novels about women like Lila and Lenu are a potent reminder that working-class women’s perspectives are out there, even if we can’t always hear each other, even if we’re sometimes embarrassed and alone, even if we feel exasperated by a system that valorizes experiences and credentials that we can never claim.

At VIDA, Valeria Popp writes about her personal “Ferrante fever” as a validating experience for her based not just on Ferrante’s understanding of women, but also of the working class.

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Know the Mother by Desiree Cooper

Stacie Williams reviews Know the Mother by Desiree Cooper today in Rumpus Books. (more...)

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The Clinton Reading List

For Mother Jones, Jenny Luna notes the top four books on the current New York Times bestseller list: all books written by conservative writers speaking against Hillary Clinton:

As seen with the success of Mitt Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology, sales don’t always just reflect readers’ tastes. And back in 2007, conservative groups bought up right-leaning books in bulk and sold them at sub-retail prices, much to the dismay of their authors.

— 14 hours ago (0)

Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

Cemeteries as places of architectural innovation.

Great news everybody! Watching horror movies might burn calories! No need to exercise ever again!

A quick look at the most desirable least accessible places on earth because isn’t that what the internet is for?

So much Bauhaus online.

And you thought there was nothing new out there: physicists may have proven a fifth fundamental force.

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Notable Twin Cities: 8/21–8/27

Wednesday 8/24: Want to bookend your summer with some craft beer and the science of marketing? Join the authors of The Physics of Brand at Surly Brewing Co for Beer, Books & Brands, a release party presented by Magers and Quinn. Co-authors Aaron Keller, Renee Marino, and Dan Wallace will read, answer questions, and sign copies. 6–9 p.m., free.

Over at Subtext Books you can catch Minnesota author Ben Welter reading from his new history book, Minnesota Moxie: True Tales of Courage, Muscle, and Grit in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes (The History Press). 7 p.m., free.

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Tuesday 8/23: Kate Milford presents The Left-Handed Fate. McNally Jackson Books, 7 p.m., free.

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The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason she so often features in lists of our favourite literary characters – relies solely upon the relief cast by her dull sisters. Lizzie only has space in the book for a remarkable interior life because her sisters do not. Even beautiful Jane is a bit insipid – a fact Austen knowingly plays with, as her eventual engagement to Bingley is briefly threatened by Jane’s reticence.

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