Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Why We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th…
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I Want to Hold Your Hand
A same-sex hand holding relay was held in London as part of a three-day celebration that kicked off the countdown to the 2012 Olympic Games. Same-sex hand holding, or “sshh,” is used to promote “visibility for same-sex couples and quietly…
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Folded Paper I: Sipho Mabona
My six-year-old son is obsessed with paper airplanes. There’s a giant pile of them on our dining room table. He varies the design, or makes them huge or so tiny he can hardly fold them. But he’s on to something.…
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Roald Dahl, Man of Letters
I have read Kafka’s letters and Flaubert’s letters and Jane Austen’s letters. These authors are a part of my “adult” life. But I haven’t read the letters of authors who made the distinction between childhood and adulthood. There is a…
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The Rumpus Gets Smart: The Definitive Essay on Dudeness
“If you were a man, a real man, you’d slap me.” – ‘Young Hussy’ in the wrestling screenplay of Barton Fink. If the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre might be described as an extended frolic through the archives of film history, it…
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Rumpus Film Review: Voices from El-Sayed
It’s a shame the documentary Voices from El-Sayed isn’t as interesting as its premise.
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Nicholson Baker Tries Kindle, Finds it Wanting
If you know anything about Nicholson Baker, you know that he has an unparalleled talent for describing the small and ordinary things in everyday life, their textures and surfaces and the way they heft in the hand; and more than…
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Women’s Growing Love of Porn Is Changing the Market
“When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don’t have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.” So writes author and…
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The Rumpus Review of Funny People
With Funny People, Judd Apatow set out to make a masterpiece. What is surprising is not his failure, but the fact that he got so close.
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Fingers Through Holy Water
Gospel music, like its secular cousin the blues, never wallows in pity, but instead seeks to transcend pain and reach glory. Bashir’s book makes the same trip.
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“Stabilimentum,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Samiya Bashir
Stabilimentum Bend into my mouth before frost ends us.
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Why Books Are Stupid
Elissa Bassist recently wrote a piece extolling the virtues of books. She suggests the good ones “can make life manageable” and turn a bad day into a good one. But here’s the thing: If this were true, librarians would be…