Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“So Are You Helpless, Tragic, or Stupid?”
You may remember, from when it was featured on Longform.org, Vanessa Veselka’s GQ essay “The Truck Stop Killer,” about her life as a teenage hitchhiker and her narrow escape from a man who might have been a serial killer. Now, for…
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A Stellar Episode of a Stellar Lit Podcast
If you’re on the lookout for great podcasts about writing and writers (who isn’t?), you’ll want to stick Litquake’s LitCast in your earbuds. Their latest episode features novelist Joshua Mohr and Guggenheim fellow/Believer Book Award winner Sam Lipsyte, live at…
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The Next Letter in the Mail: Jason Novak
The next Letter in the Mail, going out next Friday, is from Jason Novak! As head illustrator for the Rumpus, Jason has created many of the site’s most memorable and beloved images, including the illustrations for Chris Stedman’s essay “Sympathy…
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Why You Can’t Take the “Porn” out of “Gay Porn”
When a community college in a small New York town hired Rumpus pal Conner Habib to speak about sex and culture for a campus Sex Week, he was psyched. After all, he’d grown up gay in a small town and knew…
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Get Out of My Crotch! Reading/Signing
If you live in the Bay Area and have forgotten whose crotch to get out of, have we got a reminder for you: a reading and book-signing of Get Out of My Crotch!, the feminist anthology featuring several Rumpus writers that…
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“Revolutionary, Disruptive Technology”: The Business of Books
What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it. In an essay for the Virginia…
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The Comical Son Returns
Bay Area comedy fans may remember the many happy years comedian and Rumpus Radio guest W. Kamau Bell spent in San Francisco before moving to New York for his TV show Totally Biased. The good news is: the show is terrific,…
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Writing Advice for Snails and/or Tortoises
Slow writers, you’re in good company. Maud Newton has a blog post up at Tin House about the blessing and the curse of taking your time with a book. Here’s a small taste: I love Alex for many reasons, and one of…
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Remember the Phoenix
The latest casualty in the decline of print media is the Boston Phoenix, a beloved alt weekly that is already sorely missed. To help lay it to rest, Slate and Longform.org compiled a list of some of the Phoenix‘s best stories about drugs,…
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More Depressing News about Bestsellers Lists
Previously, we blogged about wealthy authors paying tens of thousands of dollars to make their books bestsellers. But what happens if your book moves all those copies the good old-fashioned way, no cheating involved? Patrick Wensink, whose novel Broken Piano for…
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The Present and Future of Adobe Books
If you, like Kurt Vonnegut, are a fan of Adobe Books, you’ll be happy to hear that after all the twists, turns, and loop-de-loops of the past few months, the beloved bookstore has raised enough money to stay open as…
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The Literary Value of Boredom
What is the most important thing England’s former colonies have in common? For Saikat Majumdar, an assistant professor at Stanford, the answer is boredom. In his latest book, Prose of the World, Majumdar explores how writers from Ireland’s James Joyce to…