Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The House of Wigs
“The diary of a copywriter, written on company time, billed to the client.” The House of Wigs is a small collection of sixty admirable short stories from the folks at Fireland. This collection renews my faith in what reading will…
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Secondhand Bookiestore
A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes one of the more unusual uses for a bookstore that…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Road
This semester, I decided to teach The Road by Cormac McCarthy. After I got my desk copy, I was sitting on BART, on my way home, and I started rereading the ending to try to figure out how McCarthy made…
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The Rumpus Original Combo: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.”
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Bad Mommy’s Shorty Q&A with Peter Rock
James Ellroy says that, “My Abandonment is an electrically charged, bone-deep, and tender tale of loss and partial redemption.”
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The Joys of Depth
How does a baby view its mother? This question bothers Ken Jacobs, a legend of independent film, whose work is currently on view at tank.tv (a free online film gallery that requires only a quick sign-up). To develop a concept…
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A FAN’S NOTES: Beautiful Losers
My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick ice. The team’s logo back then—a cartoon caveman holding a…
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Urban Nature Photography
Dubai is quite possibly the craziest place someone could be right now. A city halted in the middle of Final Fantasy style urbanization by economic collapse. A constitutional monarchy with the (unfinished) world’s tallest building and no businesses to fill…
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The Last Book I Loved: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle is a crass and hilarious slice of growing up “different,” as fun to read today as it was in 1973. Molly Bolt is an unashamed lesbian in a queer-hating world, an ambitious natural leader in…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Andrew Motion is retiring as Britain’s Poet Laureate, and he has a few words on the matter. Exoskeleton on the tension between “greatness” and the avant-garde in poetry. What do Britney Spears, James Joyce and William Shakespeare have in common?…
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The Forbidden Gaze
From The Guardian UK: “The story of how Actaeon was turned into a stag for glimpsing the naked goddess Diana has inspired artists through the centuries. Charlotte Higgins on a new exhibition that explores the idea of the forbidden gaze.”…