Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Victoria Marini: The Last Book I Loved, The Testament of Gideon Mack
The books I love and have loved in the past I have chosen almost always by the recommendations of others.The last book I loved, I loved with an added fever and thrill of having discovered it on my own. The…
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FUNNY WOMEN #4: The Importance of Attitude
My husband enjoys scuba diving. Prior to meeting my present spouse, I had never entertained the notion of going diving, as it combines three things I generally try to avoid: doing equations, wearing a rubber bodysuit, and drowning.
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DFW Reacts to Infinite Jest Cuts
“p. 52 – This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter. p. 82 – I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back.…
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Rumpus Flash Fiction: “Simoom,” by Anna North
When my father left and my mother went crazy and carved into every wooden surface of our house a name that wasn’t hers or his, I asked what she was doing. She made me get down the dictionary. “Simoom,” I…
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Random Media Notes
Just how much will Conde Naste lose this year? Time’s Joel Stein publishes Rogue Journalist: An Even More American Life (links to full text), his 49 page memoir completed in one day in order to compete with Sara Palin’s Going…
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The Return of the Publisher
The author of a novel, who recommended it, how the cover is designed, and what awards it has won often sway readers into buying literature, but it’s not often that readers select books on the basis of who’s published them.…
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Morning Coffee
Big Picture has some great pictures of the Berlin Reunion, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not to glamorize crime or anything, but this plane stealing kid is pretty awesome. on China’s Hakka “apartments.” Austrian…
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California Dreaming
If you haven’t yet watched Showtime’s hit series Californication, here’s a quick tagline: Down-and-out novelist Hank Moody – played by David Duchovny – tries to get his life back on track after his partner/muse leaves him and he succumbs to…
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On The Forgotten Magic Of Writing
“I’m so, so tired of reading about how writing should be demystified, how it doesn’t work the way Cortazar describes at all, how you toil at it slowly like you’re scrubbing a toilet, how the important parts are rewriting everything…
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Before You See “Antichrist,” A Few Other Romantic Films
It doesn’t take a Harvard-trained therapist to know that with love comes madness, obsession, jealousy, mind-fuckery, fear, panic and a healthy dose of psychosexual terrorism. Maybe these symptoms aren’t manifested in such harsh terms for everyone, but there’ s no…
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A Gate at the Huh?
Despite this novel’s serious flaws, it is a gratifying experience. You don’t so much read Lorrie Moore’s books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you.