The Withdrawal Method
In his introduction to the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Ben Marcus writes that the best contemporary fiction synthesizes the heartfelt and the innovative.
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Rumpus Articles
The Daily Dish
Andrew Sullivan , one of the most popular bloggers in the world, is a bundle of contradictions – gay, conservative, Catholic. Though British (and Oxford-educated), Sullivan now writes primarily about…
U.S. Department of the Arts?
Famed producer Quincy Jones has asked President Obama to establish a cabinet-level position for culture and the arts. An online petition already has almost 300,000 signatures. Add your name to…
Trash Art Part 1: Tom Deininger
Found object art may be more environmentally known as recycled art, or just plain trash art. But the work of Tom Deininger is anything but trash. His large found object works…
Conversations about the Internet #1: The Rumpus Interview with Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone
Biz Stone is the creative director and co-founder of Twitter. He also helped create the blogging platform Xanga and is the author of the books Who Let The Blogs Out?: A…
Invincible Cities
The interactive Web archive Invincible Cities is a Herculean accomplishment by sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara. Over three decades, Vergara has taken more than fourteen thousand photographs of urban…
A Second Class Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
Hermione Lee’s marvelous biography of Virginia Woolf tells us that Woolf applied the same clear-eyed and unstinting analysis to her father, Leslie Stephen, that she did to most of her…
Alive in San Francisco: Western Addition
For many of my SF friends, the amazing skateboard artwork of Ian Johnson is probably old news, but I just discovered his jazz portraits this weekend on the blog Hell…
Luke’s Caveman Link List
There are many theories about how man is separate from the animals. The most recent one is that fire was the difference—not in a Ringo Starr fights the other tribe…
The IT Auteur: The Rumpus Interview with Josh Weinberg
Josh Weinberg is a Denver-based tech support geek turned independent filmmaker who released his first web-based comedy video The Website Is Down: Sales Guy VS. Web Dude last spring to…
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: One Woman’s Reading History
When I started reading as a child, it was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.