Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal.
Three of our favorite publications—the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, and the New Inquiry—are joining forces to create a SXSW panel. Titled “Rebooting Cultural Criticism on the Web,” the panel…
Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them….You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your…
Masterful crime novelist Elmore Leonard has passed away at age 87 after a stroke. Leonard published 45 novels during his prolific career, including several that were adapted into movies and…
It’s quirkily written with lots of jokes, but don’t let that fool you: Delilah S. Dawson’s Terrible Minds guest post, “25 Steps to Being a Traditionally Published Author: Lazy Bastard…
If the current economic state of academia seems grim, well, it is. In an essay for Dissent, Claire Goldstene plumbs the ins and outs of student-loan debt, the exploitation of adjunct…
As Jerome Stern showed with his writing guide Making Shapely Fiction, stories have shapes. Kurt Vonnegut thought so too, and, inspired by the similarities between the profiles of the New Testament and…
I am alive today because of that truck driver. He saved my life trafficking me, taking my money, selling me to another master. There is no help given for free.…
Fourteen Hills, a splendid literary journal that has published several Rumpus contributors, is turning twenty! Come celebrate their big 2-0 tomorrow at 7:00 PM at San Francisco’s Art Institute of California,…
Our essays editor Roxane Gay reviewed Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and she makes it sound like one hell of a book: There…
Purists may cringe, but it happens: When a book is turned into a movie, some scenes and characters are shrunk or eliminated entirely, while others are expanded are introduced wholesale.…
Ever since Fifty Shades of Grey, originally written with characters from Twilight as its protagonists, struck gold, the mainstream publishing world has had to take a closer look at fanfiction. In the…
In case you missed it, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean whipped up a superb “pop-culture feminist syllabus” at Flavorwire. Ranging from time-tested classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman to newer but equally exciting…