Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
The Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers discusses Zeitoun, his optimism for print publications, what the kids are reading, and the advantage of attending a state school.
-
The Storymatic
I’ve always been a sucker for writing prompts, even though they have a way of sometimes being cheesy, forced, and ultimately silly. But recently I came across this interesting product, a paper-based prompt generator that would seem to strike the…
-
Wrack & Ruin
Don Lee returns to Rosarita Bay with a novel that features Brussels sprouts, kung fu divas, feuding brothers, and a complex look at ethnic identity.
-
A Titanic for these times
The June issue of the Atlantic has a look at the mind-blowing “Oasis of the Seas,” a gargantuan ocean liner forthcoming from cruise company Royal Caribbean International. Its unprecedented scale of apparent luxury surely required feats of engineering. But any…
-
Binnie Kirshenbaum: The Last Book I Loved, A High Wind in Jamaica
Stories about pirates and orphans were my childhood favorites. Pirates, orphans, and those ever-so-enviable children–Madeline and Eloise–who lucked out with distant, absent, or dead parents: Pippi Longstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and Peter Pan, were winners for featuring distant parents and pirates.
-
Morning Coffee
Start your day off right with a little Japanese library design porn. “Man is not to end his days on Earth,” Gyula Kosice’s space architecture is on display in Houston. It took people 60 years to figure out that Raymond…
-
Dogfishing
Those of you with long memories may recall the Monkeyfishing hoax of 2001 in Slate. This was a piece by Jay Forman which revealed the existence of a illicit sport on an island of former medical research monkeys in the…
-
Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994
When my son Josh was thirteen he got braces on his teeth. His orthodontist’s office was in the same building as the Preterm clinic where John Salvi shot and killed Lee Ann Nichols on the morning of Friday, December 30,…
-
Working, as Adapted by Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar, the only famous comic-book creator who isn’t an artist himself, last month released a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working with The New Press. Dave Gilson summarizes it on Mother Jones as not “the most far-fetched attempt to…
-
Yiyun Li’s “A Soldier Home”
Late last night I sat in the Labor & Delivery waiting room in the hospital where my brother and sister-in-law were preparing for the birth of their first child. They had checked in early that morning, but the baby still…
-
North of the Border
A group of Mexican teenagers encounters a bizarre America in Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel.