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Rumpus Articles
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Walter Benjamin’s Translation Machine
“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome…
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Edith Wharton’s Lost Letters
In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. “Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann’s family ignored her wishes and, for the past ninety years, their correspondence sat…
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Jonathan Lethem Meets The Thing
I was waiting on a couple the other night at a restaurant where I work, and I saw a strange box on their table that had Jonathan Lethem‘s name printed on it. When they opened it up, a pair of…
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Derrick Jensen’s Essay from The Time After
In the time after, when industrial civilization is a bitter and too-slowly-fading memory, a memory of a nightmare too atrocious to be believed by those who were not alive in the time before and so did not experience it and…
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We Choose the Moon
An interactive re-creation of the Apollo 11 mission, using archival radio, film, and photographs, is currently underway at We Choose the Moon (.org); if you can tune in around 1:00 today, the astronauts will land on the moon once more,…
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Much Ado About Amazon’s Kindle Mishap
We covered the news that Amazon removed books from subscribers’ Kindles last week. There is, however, more to the story.
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A Survey of the Stripper Memoir
Early on in her stripper memoir Diablo Cody declares “strippers are the most fascinating, inscrutable animals I’d ever observed.” If the number of stripper memoirs that have appeared in the past few years are anything to go by, publishers agree.…
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Morning Coffee
Moleskine’s are kind of an amazing fraud, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to go to the official Moleskine 2.0 Exhibition. Speaking of frauds, an Australian town has banned bottled water. Nothing says chasity like an iPhone app. This…
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Love Is a Plane Crash of the Soul
Two Latin American novels, published in English for the first time, stake out radically different artistic territory.
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“Unputdownable.” Yes, I Said It.
With apologies to commenters who hated the word “unputdownable” in my post last week about the worst words ever, I will now point you in the direction of Elizabeth Bachner’s brilliant essay on that terrible phrase. “There are … great…