Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Stephen and Isaac on Drunken Odyssey
Woohoo! Lit podcast Drunken Odyssey has a new episode up in which host John King talks to our very own Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald. Topics include Happy Baby, About Cherry, and bend-over boyfriends. Plus it says right there on the site…
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Don’t Worry Too Much About Goodreads, Says Steve Almond
Amazon’s buyout of Goodreads has a lot of people curling their lips in disgust, and Rumpus columnist Steve Almond is among them: “As a reader and writer I find all this pretty despicable.” But it’s worth zooming out and looking at…
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Shakespeare: Poetic Genius and Capitalist Monster
This puts a whole new spin on The Merchant of Venice: According to this Associated Press article, Shakespeare wasn’t just English literature’s foremost creative visionary; he was also a hardhearted grain merchant who sometimes landed in legal trouble for his unethical business…
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Stop Reading New Fiction?
It has a provocative headline (“Literary fiction is boring!”), but J. Robert Lennon’s Salon piece about what writers should read is not nearly as simplistic or sensationalist as you might expect. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, he does…
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“Ooh! A Pencil App!”
“I’m bored. New window!” Treasured Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak illustrates the secret lives of web journalists over on the Paris Review‘s blog. Bloggers, you might want to shield your eyes. It hits a little close to home.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Happy Easter, and we hope you found all the eggs that have ever been hidden from you. Our posting schedule was a little light because of the holiday, but we always have a Saturday comic by Yumi Sakugawa and a…
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Read My Lips (Or At Least Try To, It’s Pretty Difficult)
For Stanford Magazine, Stanford master’s student Rachel Kolb describes what it’s like navigating the world of the hearing when you were born deaf, with a particular focus on reading lips. As it turns out, lip-reading isn’t nearly as accurate as movies…
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And the Winner Is…
After a month of victories and losses and thrilling deliberation, the Morning News‘s Tournament of Books has chosen a champion: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson! The harrowing, North Korea–set epic beat out The Fault in Our Stars by John Green in…
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“In Praise of Editors”
All writers should go read every word of this essay by Maria Bustillos, written on the occasion of editor Carrie Frye’s departure from the Awl. The gist of it: your editor is your friend, not some censorious know-it-all trying to…
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Where’d You Get Those Shoes?
Some eBay sellers bare their souls, like a woman who went on a shopping spree when her marriage was on the rocks. “The husband was just starting to roam, things were going south very quickly, so now I had 6…
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The Next Letter for Kids: Arthur Slade
The next Letter for Kids, going out tomorrow, is from Arthur Slade. Slade is the author of several short stories, comics, and novels for children and young adults, including Draugr, Dust, and The Hunchback Assignments. He also writes reviews and articles, and maintains…
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Surprising Children’s Book Authors
Sylvia Plath wrote a children’s book…and apparently Jim Carrey is going to as well? Brain Pickings has scans of the text and charming illustrations of Plath’s book, a story about young Max Nix and his bright yellow It Doesn’t Matter…