Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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We’re Elite
Publishing is failing us, and it is failing. The lamentable irony is that its foundation rests upon satisfying readers by assuming we’d like to read whatever crap is one level above being able to read. In four parts, Thomas McGonigle…
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A Day in the Life of the Real Mafia
Gomorrah is a self-conscious repudiation of gangster movies like Scarface; a reminder that the classy foot soldiers of The Godfather and the bumbling mafiosi of The Sopranos have very little to do with the real world.
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No One Crafts a Soundtrack Like Wes
The funny thing about Wes Anderson is that it’s both hard to imagine yet simultaneously all too obvious why he is wildly popular in some milieus, hardly known in others, and wholly eschewed in a third circle. A recent interview…
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The Rumpus Interview with Carlos Serrano Azcona
“The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the other part of the film. The point is that what…
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Rediscovering the West
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
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…Is Another Man’s Fertility Fetish
The main character in Karan Mahajan’s novel, Family Planning, is a man who is only attracted to his wife when she is pregnant. “He liked the smooth, alien bulge of her stomach or the tripled heartbeat when they made love,…
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J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir
After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known for his dystopian science fiction, Ballard analyzes his own life…
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The Unhappy Writer, Links by Mark Pritchard
A recent entry on the publishing blog Galleycat told of the writer Molly Jong-Fast and how she was quitting writing to become an agent. Jong-Fast’s somewhat privileged complaints — she is the daughter of Erica Jong and the novelist Jonathan…
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You Never Knew It Could Be Like This
Koert van Mensvoort is transforming the Internet and the culture around it. A Dutch artist and professor, Mensvoort challenges how we experience the world around us, especially, but not only, the digital world. His Web site asks: “Why not start…
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The Eyes of Our Skin Are Closed
The enchantment of Dangerous Laughter is not merely a function of the tales themselves, but also of the way in which Millhauser tells them – with careful, attentive prose that is rich in detail yet never overwhelming.
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The Boss from the Hell Bosses Already in Hell Get Sent To
From the self-employed comfort of my couch and a distance of about thirty years, oil company CEO Edward “Tiger Mike” Davis gives excellent memo; his contemptuous, petty rants read like the love song of Daniel Plainview. But for anyone unlucky…
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The Evolution of Female Promiscuity
“Darwin was a prude” for failing to consider the possibility of female promiscuity, an omission that delayed the study of sperm competition for 100 years. But don’t blame him — his sexually repressed daughter combed her daddy’s texts for references…