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.
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…
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…
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…
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.…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…