Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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It Has Ever Been Thus
“Printed books have been in existence for four hundred years at the most, and already they pile up in certain countries in such a way as threaten the old balance of the planet. Civilization has arrived at the most unexpected…
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Mike Tyson in Five Acts: A Rumpus Consideration
I Mike Tyson doesn’t seem full of it, but sometimes it seems full of him. Each persona gets taken to an extreme. Think Gollum in Lord of the Rings, if he moved up a few weight-classes; or Hamlet on protein…
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Lily Burana’s Been Busy
Back in April The Rumpus interviewed Lily Burana. Since then she has been busy promoting her recent memoir I Love A Man In Uniform with a book tour that stopped in several US cities and military installations (although not West…
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The Irresistible Illusion
Rory Stewart’s LRB article “the Irresistible Illusion,” analyzes the language current Western leaders use when speaking about Afghanistan. Then he compares it to similar speeches made by others since 1868. Spoiler: Nothing new has been said in over 140 years.…
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VQR Interviews Michelle Orange
The Rumpus’s own Michelle Orange has a contribution in the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s most recent issue. The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into…
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Sullivan
Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus…
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Morning Coffee
Social networking sites as art installation. Light-test.com collects photographer’s, uh, light tests. The results are playful and fascinating. A Journey Round My Skull takes a rare trip outside its selfimposed literary borders into the world of music paraphanalia. This one…
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An Author’s Experience of Cover Design
Earlier this month, the subject of book cover design, and who the final design should speak to, blipped across the blogs for a day or so after Seth Godin reasonably opined that the single purpose of a book cover is to…
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Infinite Summer Roundup
I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like to participate and somehow haven’t heard of it yet, there’s…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony’s first novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s Books) is the first recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. It’s about a really short guy who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia and is in love with…