Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The Last Book I Loved: Inner China
Eva Sjödin’s poem-novel maps in swift, uncanny sentences the dark marvels of being little. I am a sucker for tales of sisters, especially when an older must defend a younger from threats. Left by a stupefied mother to their own…
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A Family Affair: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Cult Rock
Charles Manson is a bad man. I’ve never kidded myself to that fact, and I don’t glamorize his crimes or the crimes of his “family” one bit.
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Morning Coffee
This is day three of me filling in for Dan. His absence is making me jittery. It turns out breast milk is good for babies. In other news, being stabbed is bad for the body. (Unless it’s Dan’s body –…
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TRUTH SERUM:
Online DisconnectionTruth Serum books (big commitment). Truth Serum on Facebook (small commitment).
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Seven Thousand Skulls and a Tolerant Spouse
“How many people want to spend their entire day — their entire life, I guess, at this point — collecting heads from rotting marine mammals? Well, Ray does!” From Shelf Life, a 25-minute documentary you can watch here, about Ray…
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Lethem on the “Squandered Promise” of Science Fiction
“In 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the highest honor available in the field once known as “science fiction” — a term now mostly forgotten. “Sorry, just dreaming… [T]hough Gravity’s Rainbow really was nominated for the 1973…
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“Edmund Wilson Regrets That It Is Impossible For Him To:”
Writer and famed literary critic Edmund Wilson wasn’t a fan of giving interviews, doing any kind of editorial work, reading manuscripts, and a number of other things according to a printed response to “a student group asking him to do…
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Part Shovel, Part Man, All Awesome
After learning about the KGB orchestrated birth of the theremin and the beginning of electronic music as we now know it, I began to fear that all of humanity’s greatest moments of musical ingenuity may already be behind us. At…
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Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
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Gladwell on Finch
“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and…