Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
The Last Book I Loved: The Fixer
A couple of years ago I went totally bananas over The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The story: Yakov, a Jewish man living in Russia in the early 1900s, is falsely…
Artists Interview Artists: Paul Madonna and Hope Gangloff
“I feel it’s very important for artists to participate in swaying the popular vote to realize truths in politics.”
The Last Book(s) I Loved: Juliet Linderman, Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia
It’s impossible to read George Saunders books slowly. This might be cheating because I’d read them before, although not in a few years, but a couple of weeks ago I…
Cool Art on 19th Street
I saw this piece on the corner of 19th and Valencia (in San Francisco). The technique used to create it looks pretty insane. The figure is obviously cut out of…
Alison Tyler: The Last Book I Loved, Born Standing Up
The album is from 1974, but we got our grubby little hands on a copy of a tape in the early 80s, which we played so often we had the…
The Last Book I Loved: Microcosms
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and…
Why are we dead anyhow?
A brief look at James Purdy’s career. It is customary to speak of an artist having his fingers on the pulse of a nation’s culture. Purdy, on the contrary, repeatedly…
How Books Got Their Titles
A blog about how famous books got their titles, peppered with amusing and surprisingly sexual anecdotes. John Cleland’s title Fanny Hill is dirty, but not for the reasons you might…
The Chaser
The Chaser is Australia’s answer to Monty Python, the Frat Pack, the Kings of Comedy, and every other great comedy squadron. The Chaser began with a satirical newspaper, and has…
The Rumpus Review of Sunshine Cleaning
Sunshine [Cleaning] is more about the gallows than the humor.