Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Cool SXSW Panel Needs Votes
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 hopes to address questions like: “How do we make literary…
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“Typos on the Internet”
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 oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. For The…
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RIP Elmore Leonard
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 TV shows, such as Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma, and Rum Punch…
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Want to Publish a Book? Here’s How
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 Edition,” is thorough, professional, and extremely helpful. From advice to…
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Cracks in the Foundation of the Ivory Tower
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 professors, and what it all means for the country at…
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Vonnegut and the Shapes of Stories
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 “Cinderella,” he plotted out several of those shapes in his…
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A Glimpse of Modern-Day Slavery
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. I was a transaction. Those are the words of a…
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Fourteen Hills Turns Twenty
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, where there will be a variety of wonderful readers and…
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“This Novel Treads So Finely Between Hope and Despair”
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 is warmth and wit, and a hard-won wisdom about the…
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Hey, That Guy Wasn’t In the Book!
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. Bookish has a nifty roundup of minor characters in books…
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Fanfiction Gathers Force
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 (increasingly unlikely) event you’re unfamiliar with the world of fanfiction,…
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The Feminist Reading List to End All Feminist Reading Lists
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 material like Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Dean’s…