2014
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Ask Yourself a Question and Give Yourself an Answer
Excellent. When you’re asked, “Where do you get your inspiration?” what do you wish you could say, but keep to yourself? That as a child, my parents fucked me up, and the only way to cope with that was to…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Almond
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Almond about his new book, Against Football, One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, the complicity of fans in the violence of the NFL, the sports media’s role in the discussion (or lack of one) and…
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Weekly Geekery
Requiem for a pigeon. Fiction meets reality in space. Our Lord and Savior, science fiction. The right to know vs. the right to be forgotten. The proliferation of nerd. How technology is changing the spoiler.
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Love and Hate
Sometimes we can’t help but blame the people we need for making us need them. In an essay for the New York Times’s Modern Love column, Rumpus contributor Anna March writes about the fear of losing someone she depends on: Reading online…
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Reading Others in America
When it comes to our literary dialogue, Kiese Laymon stands unaffected: The problem with our national lit isn’t just that it’s often written from the same voice; it’s written often to the same listeners. But if you changed the listeners,…
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Attention Spans Fall, Short Fiction Rises
That is not to say that normal books will decline. Of course they won’t. There will always be a place for big, satisfying stories to burrow through. But it seems that the rise of short stories are partly caused by…
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Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton & 639 Others
Anisse Gross reviews Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Sharpton & 639 Others today in Rumpus Books.
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You Are What You Review On Yelp
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, linguist Dan Jurafsky analyzes the metaphors we use to describe different kinds of food. Turns out humans are pretty optimistic: The Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Also climate change is making polar bears eat geese. We’ve got about five billion years left in this galaxy. Let’s all take a tour of the world’s deadliest garden. Here is some British fairground art for you. Did the invention…
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The Rumpus Interview with M.E. Thomas
M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, discusses writing a memoir, being a lawyer and a Mormon, the unreliability of memory—and, of course, being a high-functioning sociopath.
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YA Lit Tackles Modern Concerns
Plenty of critics have lamented the rise of Young Adult literature, but its popularity isn’t accidental. The genre is focusing on contemporary problems and, more importantly, manifesting them in easily digestible ways that appeal not just to teens, but to…
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The Rumpus Weekly Review of Books
David Bowie, Sisyphus, the Filipino diaspora, and Canada’s most prestigious anthology of poetry.