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.
Sure you love old-fashioned books, but sometimes they’re too bulky to carry on the bus, or you don’t want to devote valuable bookshelf real estate to something you’re not sure…
Novelist Dennis Miller was participating in a panel discussion about censorship at Mansfield University’s campus library, when he joked that his book should be banned: “It has sex, violence, and…
Rumpus pal W. Kamau Bell got all fancy and moved to New York to host his hilarious TV show Totally Biased. But we haven’t forgotten his San Francisco roots, and neither…
Although it has stirred up controversy with its cover photo, the Rolling Stone article about alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is honest and interesting and frustrating and perplexing. How did a…
When the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, “to throw…
Orange Is the New Black, the new Netflix series based on the memoir of Rumpus interviewee Piper Kerman, has piqued viewers’ interest in the stories of women in prison. Whose…
From Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, there’s something about baseball stories that captures our imaginations. Have baseball movies done the same? Maybe,…
Still hyped up from Beast Crawl and counting down the days until San Francisco’s Lit Crawl in October? Then you’ll want a ticket to Lit Tease, LitQuake’s preview/fundraiser event for…
In the latest installment of an Autostraddle feature described as “a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into,” Carmen Rios throws a little love party for bell hooks. Inspired…
Here’s an informative little roundup of book news from the New Yorker‘s book-news blog. Highlights include a 300-year-old cookbook, a “‘new type of fragmentation’ in contemporary literature,” and oh yeah—Reese Witherspoon…
Talk about good timing: on the same day we posted Stephen S. Mills’s essay about working for a for-profit school, Racialicious reposted an essay looking at the issue from the…
Emotions tend to run high around controversial confessional writer Marie Calloway’s blunt descriptions of sex, but few have discussed her exploration of sex work. Enter sex-worker blog Tits & Sass, where…