Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
Spotlight: “Nuts: A True Story” by Peter Witte
It’s more likely, though, that someone saw everything and felt sympathy that, in the moment, they just didn’t communicate.
-
The Fine Point of Communication
At Aeon, Thom Scott-Phillips compares words and images, literature and visual art, to reveal their complementary nature in getting to the point.
-
The Dreamer Gazing
Using examples like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Laura Miller analyzes our modern concept of what an “allegory” is, in comparison to how the word has historically been used to describe literature, and how…
-
Then Are You Actually Funny?
At Electric Literature, Claire Luchette interviews Rebecca Schiff, author of the recently released story collection The Bed Moved, about the forces shooting through her fiction: humor, sex, womanhood, and the in-between.
-
The Fight Against North Carolina’s HB2
Following in The Boss’s footsteps, many musicians are speaking out against North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom bill,” which bans trans men and women from using bathrooms of a gender other than that listed on their birth certificates. Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam, Boston,…
-
A Novelist’s Comics
Samuel Sattin considers the impact of writing comics to a novelist’s narrative sensibilities at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
-
The Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use…
-
D & K’s Fried Fish
In the yard of the single-wide trailer that will haunt you for the rest of your life, watch as your father pulls fish from the cooler, one by one.
-
The Sound of White Flight
Over at Catapult, Kashana Cauley explores the origins of the Midwestern accent and discovers its roots in racial segregation: Apparently it wasn’t enough for GLVS [Great Lakes Vowel Shift] speakers to move very far away from minorities in order to…
-
Notable Los Angeles: 5/9–5/15
Monday 5/9: Maria Toorpakai reads from and signs her book A Different Kind of Daughter. 7 p.m. at Chevalier’s Books. Anne Edwards discusses and signs Streisand: A Biography. 7 p.m. at Book Soup. David Ulin and Paul Kolsby, with Steph Cha,…
-
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, in the Saturday Interview, Deesha Philyaw talks to celebrated writer Darryl Pinckney about his latest novel, Black Deutschland, and drawing inspiration from Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. Pinckney describes Berlin as “a somewhere not everyone wanted to bother with.” Racism in American…
-
Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have…