The Day Everyone Laughed
Think Wilde, Wodehouse, Carroll, Cervantes—comedy has a thousand-year-old affair with literature. That said, what makes people laugh is as elusive and surprising as it is fascinating. Have you heard of…
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Casey Dayan
98 posts
Casey Dayan is a Rumpus intern and musician. He is finishing up his undergraduate studies in literature and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he is working on a memoir and trying to one-up Jeff Buckley. Find his twitter here, @caseydayan. Find his band, “Moo,” here.
What We Can’t Say
You know the feeling perfectly. You’re at an interview. The manager clears his throat, says, “Tell us a bit about some of your strengths.” Despite the facts that he repeatedly…
Twelve Years, One Book Later
Another testament to the tribulations of novel-making: over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma discusses the particular technical problems he faced while writing Family Life as well as how, exactly, he…
Jane Austen Would Be Eating Top Ramen Too
With writers, it’s usually neither rags to riches nor riches to rags. Marx had Engels, Austen had her family. Read this and rest assured: some cool people lived with their…
Art Undying, Georgia O’Beef Stew
Open mics, poetry contests, theatre prospects—a small “Art Bar” in Santa Cruz, California is using art, beer, and uniquely named food to fund local arts education. On its busiest days,…
Discovered: Aesop Manuscript
Fine, you caught us: it’s a McSweeney’s thing. In one sense, these mock-Aesop fables show just how untranslatable the morality of antiquity is to the modern, post-Enlightenment subject. In another…
On Dying, from the Heart
Over at The Weeklings, find an excerpt from Sean Murphy’s book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone: A Memoir of My Mother. You learn not to talk to the…
Tricks and Tropes of the Trade
Though it may never be nominated for an Oscar, the contemporary ad has unarguably become a genre of its own. Over at McSweeney’s, Kendra Eash pokes fun at some of…
The Perfect Body
In this essay, Larissa Pham gives her readers a clear look into the nitty gritty details of her childhood. In Southeast Asia, as in ballet, femininity is quiet, graceful, small,…
Budding Sexuality with Jehovah’s Witnesses
If you’ve read and liked Nick Cave Monday, take a look at this interview with Tony DuShane about his novel Jesus Jerks, a semi-autobiographical work about his coming of age…
On a Tethered Sexuality
Fortifying the old adage “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,” Rumpus intern Ashley Perez wrote an article for The Weeklings about her sexual unfolding. It begins with mental…
Is the Essay like Reality TV?
In an article about the contemporary form of the essay, Adam Kirsch states, “The new essay is exclusively about the self with the world serving only as a foil and an…