Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Billy Twitters and His Big Blue Whale Problem
Mac Barnett, former director of 826LA, has released a children’s book: Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem. JR at Three Guys One Book has this to say:
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Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick
I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist. I remember feeling this during a month long trip to Mexico. I saw villages with homes made…
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Robot Horses Waging War on Angels: A Profile of Chris Eaton
There are bodies, and there are words. The bodies shift sides and see their components replaced; they look in mirrors and see themselves made horrific, the mechanical overtaking the organic, and they ask themselves whether they can still feel, still…
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Freedom Fighters
A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.
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America Wants to Gay Marry the Phrase “Gay Marry”
Mark Peters takes a look at the linguistic and cultural meanings behind America’s favorite new idiom: “gay marry.” You know, as in… “‘I going [sic] to do unspeakable things to this sandwich. Like gay-marry it.’ June 23, 2009, Alison Agosti,…
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The Last Book I Loved: C. Max Magee, Paper Trails
A collection of newspaper columns might sound like pretty dull fare, especially 30-year-old columns. But Pete Dexter’s punchy, combustible, wry, and sometimes goofy pieces are irresistible. Paper Trails, released in hardcover in 2007 (but never released in paperback and now…
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Animatio Absurdus: The Rumpus Interview with Arthur Jones
Gored by a banana on a barroom floor, a man lies supine as a nun slaps a midget, a down-and-out Santa drinks hard and a sullied beauty queen totes a severed head.
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Hala Hala’s Uncommon Economic Indicator
“The owner of the Hala Hala bodega explains what he sells the most of in this economy and gives his thoughts on why.” From Isaac Littlejohn Eddy‘s Fort Greene Illustrated (read our one word interview with Isaac here).
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Morning Coffee
70 golden cages of light in Northern France. We’re not sure what the point is, but it certainly is pretty. In Oslo they are building new crystaline skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in Hiroshima, they are going in the opposite direction. The worst…
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Tony Comstock on the MPAA Ratings Board
Tony Comstock is the founder of Comstock Films (likely NSFW), which produces films that I can’t bring myself to call pornography, even though their central subject, depicted in explicit detail, is the sex that ordinary couples have in private. The…
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Like a Pack of Alaskan Dogs
“Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant. San Francisco. ‘I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men.…