The Daily Rumpus
Get Our Overly Personal
Email Newsletter
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of the truth.
...more
Revolution Books in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood is exploiting Trump’s election to raise money for a fight against fascism.
People in Japan value neighborhood bookstores so much that local governments are opening government-run stores in an effort to keep community spaces flourishing.
...more
Chicago’s bookstores, bracing against the looming arrival of a physical Amazon store, are stronger than ever. Check out this roundup of local indie stores.
Fišer bookstore, a Prague institution since the 1930s, is closing.
Korea’s oldest bookstore closed fourteen years ago, but Jongno Books is set to reopen in Seoul.
...more
I don’t consider myself a political person. To me, there are no “wrong” political beliefs. I believe that democracy means respecting everyone’s right to her opinion. And if I were forced to declare my own political views, I would have to reluctantly admit that, out of cynicism and self-interest, I find myself increasingly leaning towards the right.
...moreChicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store.
One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books.
Some people actually like airport bookstores.
A rural Virginia bookstore has become wildly successful.
...more
To research her book Without You, There Is No Us, Suki Kim worked undercover as an ESL teacher in North Korea. Kim was reluctant to call the work a memoir, believing that to do so “trivialized” her investigative reporting. The result was a backlash from critics, who called her undercover methods “dishonest.” At The New Republic, Kim responds to her critics:
...moreHere I am telling my story to you, the reader, essentially to beg for acknowledgment: I am an investigative journalist, please take me seriously.
In Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country, Janie, the eldest daughter of a Korean immigrant family and a graduate student in mathematics, has always carried the responsibility of appeasing and protecting her little sister Hannah, and has always felt she had to be “the one who had to fill the missing pieces.” On the very day of her sister’s birth, their grandmother tells young Janie that every generation of their family has lost a daughter and that it is her responsibility to keep her little sister safe.
...more
A review of Nami Mun’s debut novel, Miles from Nowhere 
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.”
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted his hair.
