Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Five Stages of Prince Fandom
You don’t need to know him personally, you say. You get the best of Prince through his music. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t.
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Mapping the Brain
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley published a new study about brain activity in people listening to podcasts, the New York Times reported. “Using novel computational methods, the group broke down the stories into units of meaning: social elements,…
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The Lexicon of Horror
At The Millions, Madeleine Monson-Rosen explores how the “lexicon of horror” influences novelist Victor LaValle’s thinking about “narrative and language.” In addition, the article discusses how LaValle’s most recent work, The Ballad of Black Tom, draws from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” for inspiration.
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Rock Show at the Sistine Chapel
It happened—we’ve entered a new dimension: there has been a rock concert at the Sistine Chapel. It was the Edge, it was a benefit, and Leonard Cohen was covered, Stereogum reports. Watch a clip of the performance after the jump.
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Recollections of Home
The woman looked at me when she finished reading, smiling, expecting me to compliment her English. But I couldn’t speak, moved beyond words by a sense of homecoming in this place so far from home. Over at Travel + Leisure,…
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Keeping Secrets from the Stupid
I was four years old when my mother taught me to lie. There were certain instances, she explained, when lying was acceptable, when it wasn’t even lying, really.
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Embodying Memory
For Electric Literature, Melody Nixon interviews Ruth Ozeki about what it means to write “embodied prose”: I find that whether I’m writing fiction or memoirish essay, whatever you want to call it, the key to any kind of literary writing is…
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape will return next week. She thanks Jen Fitzgerald for taking over during National Poetry Month and looks forward to offering you a bevy of new reading recommendations upon her return.
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Notable San Francisco: 5/4–5/10
Wednesday 5/4: The program in Creative Writing at St. Mary’s presents faculty member Brenda Hillman with alumnus Andrew Kenower. Free, 7:30 p.m., St. Mary’s College. Green Apple Books hosts Speaking Volumes’ “Breaking Ground Tour” of Black British writers, featuring readings by…
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The Future of Hip-Hop
The rap golden age of the ’90s may be over, but rappers today are achieving a kind of mainstream cultural influence that would’ve been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Over at The Walrus, Simon Lewsen writes about Canadian rapper Drake,…
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Long-Distance Writing
Over at The Collapsar, Brian Oliu pens a stunning essay on writing, running, and changing one’s perception of both the body and the prose: This, to me, is what a successful essay does: it confesses before the writer is ready–instead…
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Telling Your Own Truth
The art of storytelling is largely about choosing what is to be conveyed and—most importantly—what is to be left out. For FSG’s “Works in Progress,” Guillermo Erades, author of the just-released Back to Moscow, writes about the persistently bedeviling give-and-take of fiction…