2011
-

Spotlight: Adrian Tomine
Like most things I liked when I was sixteen, I first got into Adrian Tomine’s comics because of my older sister, who let me borrow her early issues of Optic Nerve. The series began as a set of self-published mini-comics, Xeroxed…
-

Chris Huntington: The Last Book I Loved, The Brothers Karamazov
We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics…
-

Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #5: Maudlin
Maudlin: a feeling we don’t so much encounter as create. A sad place with funereal bits and a ladle of self-pity. Darker than Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, it is a place far past despair.
-

The Last Book I Loved: Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
I was browsing through my favorite small indie bookstore (Farley’s in New Hope, PA; it’s magnificent) when the cover and title of this book captured my eye. A book displaying peaceful nighttime ocean scene, mildly disrupted by the UFO beaming…
-

Their Faces Blur in Every Mirror
Darling writes with incredible crispness, but the world she describes remains cold, stark, upper-class, and difficult to relate to.
-

Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language. “I write,” it begins. “I write that I am writing.…
-

Rumpus Original Poetry: A History of Melancholia: Glossary of Terms
beloved. The raison d’être of the melancholic’s affliction. Consider the graceful line of his wool coat, its fabric dark against the towering snowdrifts.
-

Did You Write a Letter that Sugar Answered?
Can you be in San Francisco on February 14th? Are you willing to discuss your experience in front of an audience? If so, email Sugar AT therumpus.net!
-

Behind the Scenes of a Regular Sugar Reader
Sugar writes words that I would like tattooed on my tongue. That I want stitched onto my childhood quilt since I can’t actually stitch my heart up with them.