Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The Shorty Q & A with Larry Smith
Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine keyed into the popularity and resonance of short, pithy bios even before “tweet” made its way firmly into the vernacular.
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The Garden of Eden
Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older than those of Stonehenge, dating to about 11-12,000 years ago.…
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Once the Shore: The Rumpus Review
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted…
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How Not to Lie
Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s a meandering, dreamy piece drifting between nostalgia and a hard-nosed…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jason Kottke
“The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby… so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into something I could live off of… The bigger challenge was how to balance taking the site seriously…
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Ben Tolman’s Microscopic Surrealism
Wandering through Ben Tolman’s online gallery of pen and ink drawings can quickly turn into a search for what’s buried among the ornate camouflage. Like looking through a microscope onto an entire world of vivid organisms, you could zoom in…
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Kindle: Definition
From Merriam-Webster: Main Entry: kin·dle Pronunciation: \ˈkin-dəl\ Function: verb Etymology: Middle English, probably modification of Old Norse kynda; akin to Old High German cuntesal fire Date: 13th century Definition (1): transitive verb: to start (a fire) burning : light The…
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The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
It’s a tricky thing, a memoir of a death: you know how it’s going to end. The challenge for the writer (not only with regard to the conclusion) is making the inevitable unknown.
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Words Before the Doors Close
For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s Jewish counterpart is Yiddish–and it even sometimes sounds like it.…
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The Best Show You Aren’t Watching
The Internet is the new Television. But way better! Childrens’ Hospital is a Web series written, directed, and starred in by Rob Corddry. David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, The State, Stella, Role Models, etc.) is one of the executive producers. This…
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Paul Rudd in a Deleted Scene from The Ten
“$3.50 for a cappuccino? Do I get a bowl of soup with that too?”
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And Now, A Year of Recognition
After a lifetime of extreme, little-known performances, 58-year-old Tehching Hsieh is suddenly in the spotlight.