The Rumpus Interview with Jim Gavin
Jim Gavin is a talented writer who allows his stories the room they need to be told. These are stories that are intelligent and quiet and moving, stories that take up time and space in satisfying ways.
...moreJim Gavin is a talented writer who allows his stories the room they need to be told. These are stories that are intelligent and quiet and moving, stories that take up time and space in satisfying ways.
...moreHere’s hoping you were too busy attending panels and buying Write Like A Motherfucker mugs at this year’s AWP to read The Rumpus this weekend. And here’s hoping you’ll read the two spectacular essays we ran right now.
The first is a piece about binges—on food, drugs, exercise, anything, everything—by Chloe Caldwell.
...moreI always had the sense that I was American but never more so than when I moved from New York to California
...moreThe Bold Italic is going on tour!
The site will be traveling up and down the west coast to Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. In each city, there will be a pop-up shop featuring goodies from local San Francisco stores, an art show curated by Dan Johnson Lake, Berlin Style Ping-Pong, and much more!
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In Sam Benjamin’s debut memoir, American Gangbang, we follow an aspiring porn director as he finds what he’s looking for–and what he’s not.
Jillian Lauren’s first book, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, tells her true story of living in a harem in Brunei. She is most recently the author of Pretty, a novel about a young lady named Bebe who goes from drugged-out stripper to cosmetology school then finds Christianity.
What up Los Angeles? The Rumpus doesn’t exclude any part of California and to prove it, we’re having an event in LA! Because, “It’s About Time”!!
Featuring brilliant authors Joshuah Bearman and Gabrielle Calvocoressi!
The sonic samplings will be provided by musical artists C-Horse, Naked Kids, Dylan Trees.
...moreI don’t think of anyone specific while writing, and I don’t want to get caught up in imagining what a reader might think because I do think that can get distracting. But I just think it has become clearer to me that writing is making a vessel to send to a reader.
...moreHow did Los Angeles, that haven of low-culture and strip mall malaise beat us (San Francisco) to the punch with high-brow coffee? (I jest. L.A. is great if you want to buy human bone jewelry, guzzle incredible garlic sauce, and hang out with famous porn stars in a 24 hour Jewish deli.)
How did not one of the six new cafes that opened last week on Valencia Street contain even a passing reference to Thomas Pynchon and his mythical post-bugle as featured in The Crying Of Lot 49?
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I felt like the book pulsed in my bag, a bright-covered blip that kept demanding I come back and progress a few pages.
The Hollywood dreams of this novel’s heroine are much like the tenets of her fundamentalist upbringing: first sacrifice, then redemption, then apocalyptic paradise.
“The border disappears, and in a finger snap we are running to cook your food, to clean your houses, to cut your grass…”
Millard Kaufman’s posthumously published novel evokes noir films of the past in the contemporary labyrinth of Los Angeles.
John Haskell’s novel takes readers on a metaphysical journey through the mind of a Steve Martin-impersonator impersonator.Gangland tours of LA, with one helluva waiver.
In New Orleans, what happens when sex workers are prosecuted as sex offenders.
A brilliantly written profile of a sniper.
“(M)y grandmother’s feet were bound in China, and there were people here in the U.S. who said, “This is horrific.” And there were people in China who said, “This is horrific.” I am so glad they said it was horrific.
...moreThere is no place on earth like Los Angeles.
But everyone knows this.
Yet perhaps there is not a single place on earth where the end of the world will seem like just another fly-by-night off-off-Hollywood movie, screened in the dank interiors of an after-hours death rock club.
...moreThe Annenberg Space for Photography opened its doors in Los Angeles on March 27, 2009. Tucked among the high-rises of Century City, the sleek, one-story structure houses a digital projection gallery whose interior design was influenced by the mechanics of a camera and its lens.
...more“I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown. It’s been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she sobbed as curious patrons at a Farmers Market coffee shop looked on, wondering what calamity had visited this poor woman who’s an honest 6 feet tall, with hair as blond as the sun.
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