October 2016
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Rumpus Original Fiction: How to Become a Tiger
Tigers are bigger than my comprehension. That’s what I want. I want to be bigger than I am, so big I can’t even imagine it, so real I can’t ever be misinterpreted.
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A “Girl” and Her Mother
At The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also…
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Term Paper of Champions
At Open Culture, Ayun Halliday introduces Kurt Vonnegut’s final assignment for his Iowa Writer’s Workshop class. Instead of a conventional essay, Vonnegut asks his students to role-play as short story publishers: Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a…
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Notable Chicago: 10/28–11/3
Friday 10/28: Visit the UrbanTheater Company for a reading and conversation with Martín Espada, moderated by Eduardo Arocho. 7 p.m., $5 suggested donation. Saturday 10/29: Jonathan Lethem reads from his book A Gambler’s Anatomy as part of the Chicago Humanities…
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We Tell Ourselves Stories to Tell Ourselves Stories
It’s not like we can all launch a Kickstarter or write a book—there’ve been hundreds of books about the border, and we still have the same problem. So I get angry, and perhaps it’s less about my feeling that all…
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HORN! REVIEWS: The Trouble With Lexie
But we don’t always behave rationally; sometimes we let pheromones, Klonopin, and the Yahtzee gods decide for us.
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Shakespearacy Theory
The New Oxford Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-writer on all three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, reports Dalya Alberge for the Guardian. In other news, the Illuminati have bought the election and Buzz Aldrin has admitted the Apollo 11…
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Lois Lowry on Lord of the Flies
Lois Lowry takes to the New York Times with her story of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at age sixteen, and how her perspective on its portrayal of children and violence has (and hasn’t) changed in…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dyslexic spies are the best spies. So you want to design a flag. Headline: French public housing architecture is weird! Headline: South Korean public housing architecture is also weird! Welcome to the age of biology cops.
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The Rumpus Interview with J.D. Vance
J.D. Vance talks about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the perils of upward mobility, and never forgetting where you come from.
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New(ish) Tolkien Book Coming in 2017
Beren and Lúthien, a Middle-earth story about forbidden love between an Elven woman and human man, based famously on Tolkien’s own love for his wife, is set to be published as its own title in 2017, on the 100-year anniversary…
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The Working Titles of Classic Lit
While the great classics studied in classrooms everywhere tend to have very memorable titles, those classics could have received slightly different treatment had their working titles been used instead. Over at Electric Literature, Carrie Mullins looks at several classics whose titles changed before publication.